Proposal: Using Topic Pages to Provide Context, Build a Cohesive Story

Proposal: Taking a two-pronged approach to online presentation of news, offering both timely articles that advance a story and durable topic pages that synthesize the complete story over time. The Innovation: Columbia Tomorrow: http://www.columbiatomorrow.com/category/meta/ Created by Matt Thompson of http://www.newsless.org A discussion on the theory behind the project: http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/06/matt-thompson-on-adding-context-and-depth-tohow-we-report-news/ The Problem: The vast majority of an online audience are not appointment listeners in the way that they might be on radio or television. Most site users come in through search engines and specific articles, rather than accessing a news site regularly, day after day. This is likely more pronounced for VOA, where much of our audience may not have daily access to the internet, even if they wanted to access the site daily. As a result, users who arrive at a VOA article about an ongoing story probably have not seen the article that preceded it. They may not even have been aware that the story was ongoing at all. Reading any given article only informs them about a small piece of the story. To get the whole story, they will have to track back through previous articles, a difficult task, and even that may not be enough to get them the information that they need. Users are more likely to do a Google search for the missing information, leaving the site to satisfy their information needs. As one newsman pointed out, The article is not the story. Each article is a data point in a larger ongoing story. News organizations tend to focus on the point rather than the big picture, but a true online-first organization should also tell their audience the overarching story. The problem with relying exclusively on articles to communicate the story is that: Articles only contain part of the story. While we are accustomed to incorporating some background information into an article, by and large it presents the most recent development. But what if the audience is not familiar with the previous development? This is a concern that is particularly salient for VOAs audience, among whom access to the web or any means of news delivery may be sporadic. For these users, reading any particular article will be like coming in at the middle, or even the end of the story.

Articles are silos. For any given article, we tend to have a multitude of related articles, multimedia and social outlets scattered across the VOA site and across the web. Not only is it difficult to point to these resources from a single article, but even if they are all linked, there is no sense of how they fit together to tell a coherent story. All the great multimedia and social resources we have at our fingertips tend to be squandered because of the difficulty in weaving them into the users experience. Articles fade away. If a situation suddenly flares up again after a period of being out of the news, it is currently difficult for a user to go back and trace what happened before, because of the way the story is scattered over a set of many articles. Furthermore, a user reading through article archives may be looking at outdated information or figures without realizing it. Articles often are not posted consistently throughout a developing story. We have limited resources to produce articles, which means that sometimes smaller developments do not get reported. As a result, those following a particular story can find themselves left in the lurch. Articles segment the search market. Articles on the same topic compete with each other for placement in search results. By segmenting the market, the clicks on any given article are lower, leading to lower search ranking for each individual article than is reflective of interest in the topic generally.

Solving the Problem: A new two-pronged approach to news presentation would better serve the needs of our online audience by focusing both on incremental developments and the larger picture. Articles will continue to present major breaking developments and analysis (interviews with experts, man on the street interviews, etc.). Topic pages will bring together all these developments to show how the story has emerged over time, provide the necessary background and context, and fill in the gaps between articles. Instead of using topic pages sporadically, they will be the cornerstone of any story expected to develop over time, such that a user tuning in at any point of the story development has access to the full range of information. The centerpiece of the topic page will be a story modeled largely after a Wikipedia entry in format (but edited by VOA staff, not by the public). This Wikipedia-style report will synthesize the storys developments into a single, cohesive piece. It will be created as the story breaks and updated over time to reflect the newest information and developments, so it will read as a comprehensive outline of the story from beginning to end, including the necessary background and context. The topic page will include links to individual articles, both in-text and appended. It will also present additional multimedia such as links to slideshows or videos where available and/or links to additional background resources such as profiles of major players or timelines. It may provide links to outside sources such as blog posts or

tweets and serve as a hub for conversation about the story, either through comments or by pointing to myvoa.com. Topic pages: Provide context and background to frame current developments and fill in the gaps in user knowledge. Are durable in that they serve as lasting records of what has happened, and can be resurrected as background if the issue reemerges. Compile resources, place multimedia/informational elements within a larger context and may create a space for conversation. Centralize the search audience and any audience, by providing a durable link that will always stay relevant.

Serving the Mission: This method of news presentation serves both the VOA and BBG mission by using methods appropriate to the audience we want to reach and by enhancing understanding in the most effective way. Questions: How is a topic page different than an article? An article tells the story of what happened in a particular incident. A topic page tells the entire story of what is happening. Using topic pages to compile the context, background and previous developments means articles can focus more than ever on incremental developments, analysis and features. How is a topic page different than a Wikipedia entry? A Wikipedia entry is a string of facts. A topic page is still a fully synthesized story, where the facts are woven together such that they paint a coherent picture of how and why a story has developed. Dont we already use topic pages? Not in the sense proposed here. Our current topic pages are an autogenerated list of stories on a particular topic, often accompanied by some sort of infographic. The only sense in which they create the type of experience proposed here is that they simplify the process of finding articles related to a developing story. However, in order to form a picture of what has happened, the user still needs to click through each individual article and try to piece together the overarching story. Isnt shorter always better on the web? Whats better is giving the audience what they want/need, so they dont have to try and find it somewhere else. A topic page allows users to consume as much or as little information as they need by presenting it in a way thats easy to digest, easy to scan, and easy to find.

Workflow: Each story will likely require an editor to track it over time, adding updates to the topic page as necessary. In addition, as articles are written, the article writer may be tasked with updating the topic page with the new information. The time required for each topic page ends up being fairly low, because the story is written incrementally as new developments occur. Each new development may only require a sentence or two. As more topic pages are implemented, the time requirements may grow for editors charged with preserving multiple pages.

What influential thinkers on the future of news media have said: Matt Thompson - http://www.newsless.org/2008/09/my-research-proposal/ Imagine if the work of the hundreds of reporters dispatched daily to cover a city didnt merely fade into an obscure archive, but added day after day to the work that came before it. An online news site in the era of Wikipedia would be a living archive, adaptable to suit any context, growing to encompass all aspects of life in a community. Entries would be deeply and meaningfully interlinked to other entries, elegantly situating every news event in multiple larger contexts. The latest news on the site could be a kind of changelog, reflecting new additions or edits in the system. The site would be a news commons atop which other narrative presentations of the news stories, blogs, videos, games could sit. Jay Rosen http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2008/08/13/national_explain. html I feel like my constant problem with the daily news media is that either youre always entering the story in the middle or often at the end, Blumberg said. And they dont do a very good job of talking about the beginning and what got us to this point where it became news. Exactly. And thats a problem. Its been a problem for a long time, except that no one ever does anything about it. Why? Because they get paid to produce the news, not the big narratives that would permit more people to understand that news. Steve Yelvington - http://www.yelvington.com/a-tale-of-two-audiences Our news websites tend to have a huge reachBut this big reach is made up mostly of occasional users -- once, twice a month. Many come from search engines. Many aren't in the target market at all. There's a much, much smaller component that's radically different from the big group. These are the loyal users, the people who come not once or twice, but 20, 30, 50 or even hundreds of times a month. There's not much in between. Hardly anybody visits 10 times a month. For the people in the small "loyal user" circle, [the article format] actually works pretty well. News stories tend to report incremental advances in an underlying tale that unfolds slowly, over time. If you're following along, the incremental story makes perfect sense. The problem is with the occasional user, for whom the incremental story may seem to be just so much monkey screech.

Done well, the topics page provides the casual, occasional user with a gentle, almost encyclopedic introduction to the topic (public issue, person, place, thing). But the regular, loyal user benefits too. Matt Mullen - http://mattmullen.wordpress.com/2009/05/12/search-aiding-therecovery/ We have content. We know what is generically in that content. However, specifically, we do not understand at a document level what our own content is really about. It is that lack of knowledge of that aboutness that separates us from being able to match our users to our content. Instead, we rely on the ability of traditional search technologies to be able to do this for us and by the looks of things, our users have voted with their feet and are instead trying massage Google into trying to to do the job for us. And Google doesnt care where it sends them. To you or to your competitors. Gina Chen http://savethemedia.com/2009/05/08/googles-advice-to-newspapers/ One concern [Google Vice President Marissa] Mayer raises is that news Web sites often publish several articles on the same topic, sometimes with nearly identical information, but their own URL. This means these different stories compete with each other in terms of placement in search results. What does she suggest: Publish evolving stories under one permanent URL as a living, changing, updating entity. She says news sites should follow the example of Wikipedia entries, which start as one thing and then are updated and evolve, but remain at the same URL. (Let me be clear; she was not suggesting news sites be open to public updating like Wikipedia, just that all the versions stay at one URL. ) She notes that The New York Times online topic pages approximate this purpose.

Ben LaMothe - http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2009/08/11/add-context-to-a-newswebsite-with-a-wiki-feature/ While scanning the news on your newspapers web site, one story catches your eye. You click through and begin to read. Its about a new shop opening downtown. As you read, you begin to remember things about what once stood where the new shop now is. Youre half-way through the story and decide you need to know what was there, so you turn to your search engine of choice and begin hunting for clues. By now youve closed out the window of the story you were reading and are instead looking for context. You dont return to the web site

because once you find the information you were looking for, you have landed on a different news story on a different news web site. Heres what the newspaper has lost as a result of the above scenario: Lower site stickiness, fewer page views, fewer uniques (reader could have forwarded the story onto a friend), and a loss of reader interaction through potential story comments.

Here is the story VOA ran on Madagascar on August 10, the day after an agreement was signed to end the crisis:

There was no VOA story announcing the agreement. Someone following this story through VOA would have been in the dark until this article came out the following day. A topic page could have filled in this detail in the meantime.

The article provides details on the most recent development. Under the proposed plan, articles would still carry out this function. A topic page would likely pare down this information and place it within the context of the

This is the only place where the user is directed to find background details. While they chronicle the development of the talks, none gives additional background on the crisis. A search for Madagascar on VOA brings up hundreds of articles since the start of the conflict. A topic page would ensure that a summary of the crisis

The level of background provided here is probably not enough for the occasional user who does not know the history of the crisis, and too vague for the frequent user who is well aware that Madagascar has been involved in a crisis. This inability to marry the needs of the two audiences in an article would be rectified by a topic page, which would provide a summary of events, serving the occasional user, as well as

What a topic page might look like: