Most of what we call news is filler. The practice of filling space and time — stuffing “content” into a “news hole” — is a relic of an era when printing and broadcast space and time were limited, privately held, and paid for mostly by advertising, which requires ears and eyeballs showing up predictably and in fixed places.
Let’s pull news out of its hole
6 responses to “Let’s pull news out of its hole”
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[…] But that’s just me. There many roadmaps providing direction. I’ve posted links in the third paragraph above. Here is one from the New York Times. Don’t like any of those, business writer Jim Collins has written several books that outline a course of action for business. So has Clayton Christensen. (And here’s a thought from Dave Winer, and a plea from Doc Searls.) […]
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[…] link sono al post di Doc (Most of what we call news is filler. The practice of filling space -stuffing content into a news hol…) e a un saggio di Paul Graham. Il saggio di Paul è del 2009 ma dimostra bene come fosse possibile […]
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I’m actually developing a tool with a group at George Mason University aimed at doing exactly that, starting with RSS, but looking to expand further, called PressForwad. Syndication, especially done with an editorial eye, a topical focus, and with a group is, I think, a major space for the news business to go.
We’re building out a tool that lives inside of WordPress, pulls in RSS, and allows groups to discuss, nominate and syndicate those posts into one river and RSS feed. A number of academic journals are working around it, as is at least one news room (I’m hoping more will as well).
Check out the site: http://pressforward.org/ and the open-source code: https://github.com/PressForward/pressforward/. We’re getting the whole thing ready for a wider release soon, and I’m hoping to work with more newsrooms to see them use it as well.
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Aram, I’m interested to learn more about your WordPress tool. Are you saying that the comments will become part of the actual content of the post?
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@Joe – Not exactly. Those comments are for backed discussion among editors as they work through syndication feeds, nominate and draft aggregated content. They could potentially be made public too, though the code to do that isn’t included in PressForward at the moment. It’s a cool idea though, I should totally add it.
Though if you *are* interested in making comments part of posts, I built an entirely different plugin to do that: https://github.com/CFOPublishing/response-stack
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Cool! Thanks Much! I’ll have to give that a try.
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