Object Oriented Journalism

Redefining or restructuring the news story paradigm.

Some of these stories refer to news startup http://cir.ca which began in 2011 or 2012. https://twitter.com/CircaNews

http://blog.cir.ca/2013/07/25/the-unit-of-news-we-all-already-use

http://paidcontent.org/2013/06/27/circa-looks-at-news-the-way-other-companies-look-at-code-as-something-to-build-with

1997 story: http://www.theobvious.com/archive/1997/08/25.html

http://www.pbs.org/idealab/2013/06/mona-lisa-stopped-smiling-a-conversation-on-the-phenomenology-of-news155

http://www.fastcolabs.com/3008881/tracking/circas-object-oriented-approach-to-building-the-news

Excerpts from the above stories:

At Circa, we are creating a database of facts, quotes, stats, events and images. We thread these together to tell an intentional storyline (a model). The view of that model changes based on editorial decisions about which points (from the database) are relevant at that time. Our “controller” mediates the relationship between various stories to each other (whether stories are linked together and at what point we make that association). Indeed — whenever we update stories I tell the team to “refactor,” which is literally a programming term, but is not a stretch to explain the editorial process we go through in order to keep stories relevant, up to date and clean.

If Circa had a storyline about DOMA from 1996 it would have been dormant for some time, but activated again when Clinton came out against the legislation. We model a story by identifying the moments that push it forward and alerting “followers” about how it shapes the story.

At Circa we “atomize” news or break down news into its “atomic elements.”

Whether it’s the Tweets of the Boston Police Commissioner or a Facebook post from the brother of the Newtown Elementary School shooter, digital elements which exist outside of news articles are frequently brought into articles on a regular basis. No journalist should blink an eye at this statement. Your average media consumer is savvy enough to understand when an element (or unit) is brought in from another digital source to enrich a story.