Ed Yong : Not Exactly Rocket Science

That's not to say that news pieces as we know them are journalistic dinosaurs. After all, people go to Wikipedia for summaries of newsworthy topics after finding out about them through more traditional channels. I doubt that many use the site as their primary news source. At a population level, a mix of approaches seems best - reporting of news alongside living resources that place them within a broader landscape.

Science journalist Ed Yong nicely synthesizes recent threads by Jason Fry and Matt Thompson on updating the methods we use to present news.

This Is Broken: From Game Stories to, Well, Everything « Reinventing the Newsroom

Why didn’t we change? Journalists are masters at filtering, synthesizing and presenting information, yet we’ve spent more than a decade repurposing a 19th-century form of specialized storytelling instead of starting fresh with the possibilities of a new medium. Newspapers could have been Wikipedia, instead of being left to try and learn from it. And what are we learning? The news article is in some fundamental ways just as broken as the game story — if it weren’t, Jimmy Wales wouldn’t see a surge of traffic to Wikipedia in the wake of any big news event. We need to rethink the basics: If we were starting today, would we do this? But when will we unshackle ourselves from print and really ask the question? And at what point will the answer come too late to matter?

Smart take on reinventing (read dumping) sports game stories and traditional news articles by Jason Fry.

AP vs. wiki

"Creating authoritative canonical pages based on the latest from the AP sounds like a good idea they should have implemented years ago." Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia on possible AP topic page strategy.

http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=101&aid=173537

 

Problem: Most journalists don't hyperlink so online stories are flat.

Problem (cont.): Newspapers have fewer employees making it impractical to add hyperlinks to stories after they have been published, so online stories stay flat.

Solution: Give a subset of registered readers access to versions of the articles to add relevant hyperlinks

 

Smart thoughts on next steps for journalism

A running list of thinking on our next steps for smart journalism...

Read and summarize these:

How Social Media is Taking the News Local

--From Mashable

Five concrete steps to improving the news

--From Matt at Newsless.org

 

Buzz Machine: The building block of journalism is no longer the article

The old building block of journalism — the article — is proving to be inadequate in the current onslaught of news. I’ll argue here that the new building block is the topic.

The story was all we had before — it’s what would fit onto a newspaper page or into a broadcast show. But a discrete and serial series of articles over days cannot adequately cover the complex stories going on now nor can they properly inform the public. There’s too much repetition. Too little explanation. The knowledge is not cumulative.

Read Jeff Jarvis' full post

Another good quote:

Think of it as being inside a beat reporter’s head, while also sitting at a table with all the experts who inform that reporter, as everyone there can hear and answer questions asked from the rest of the room — and in front of them all are links to more and ever-better information and understanding.

More links from Jeff's post:

LATER: See Steve Yelvington on community memory and what he’s building.

Here’s Folkenflik’s story.

 

Save this recipe: Zimzala's Farro Salad

Ingredients:

Farro, cooked (1 cup raw)
½ cup extra-virgin olive oil
red wine vinegar, to taste
salt and pepper, to taste
½ cup diced red onion
½ cup diced fennel
½ cup diced carrot
1 cup cucumber, peeled, seeded and diced
3 tomatoes (optional)
1 handful arugula leaves (optional)
2 cloves garlic, minced (optional)
1 fresh red chile, minced (optional)
2 tbsp capers, rinsed and drained
¼ cup chopped parsley
¼ cup chopped mint
¼ cup oil-cured olives (optional)

Directions:

Add the oil, vinegar, salt and pepper to the cooled farro and toss to coat evenly. Fold in the onion, celery, fennel, carrot, cucumber, tomatoes, arugula, garlic and chile. Add the capers, parsley and mint. Taste. Adjust with oil, vinegar, salt and pepper. Garnish with olives. Serve at room temperature.


http://blogs.ocweekly.com/stickaforkinit/cooking/recipe-of-the-week-zimzalas-fa/