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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
1997 story: http://www.theobvious.com/archive/1997/08/25.html
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.
Other articles have been written about what we internally call “object oriented journalism.” Admittedly this has a tone of geek/jargon to it. The phrase is really one we use internally. But once we explain that tweets, instagram posts, etc., can be thought of as “objects,” it starts to come together. The photo above was an object in hundreds of stories. Any tweet can be used, recombined and reused to form other stories.
One big distinction between how this is practiced by news organizations and Circa is that we do not limit ourselves to assuming the interchangeable bits of information have to come from the “social media” world. We believe that every fact, quote, statistic, event or image is a unit of information that should be identified as a unit whether or not it first was produced by a social media platform. We have a strict sense of every paragraph being “an idea.”
Moreover, we can reuse and recombine these ideas and keep track of what a reader has consumed in order to better serve them. This is how we overcome ‘news amnesia.’ It also allows the reader to stay in the mode of consuming ‘bits’ of information rather than an entire article, which is inline with how people already consume information on social media. The flow of information already happens in bits and bites.
There’s been plenty of talk in media circles about how the “story” needs to be disrupted, so that news can be rendered in a way that makes more sense for a real-time, digital and mobile age — but so far all we have is more listicles and slideshows, or streams of headlines that mimic a wire service. About the only company that is really trying hard to disrupt the idea of a news story from the inside out is Circa.
The service breaks stories down into their component parts — it sees individual facts themselves as the atomic unit of the news, or the objects that need to be manipulated in order to convey information as efficiently as possible. That allows Circa to dispense with the traditional media habit of recapitulating all of the old details about a story in every version, which is massively inefficient.
A related innovation at Circa — which recently hired former Reuters social-media editor Anthony De Rosa to be its editor-in-chief — is the idea of “following” a story, which allows the service to notify users when there is a new fact or update to a developing news event. This is not only more efficient for Circa itself, Cohn suggests, but also more efficient for readers as well.
I call it news amnesia. If you do articles, you have to do this since you need something new today. I think it's as frustrating for journalists as it is for the readers. What we do is say “Here's the latest fact and the story it belongs in”. Maybe it belongs in two stories. We will then point these stories to each other. Nelson Mandela has been in hospital maybe five times in the last year. We have a story tracking this and people are following it and eventually when he dies we will update it.
We value organizing content for the purpose of resurfacing it. Information in an article is a blob and you can't use it later.
New services to build stories:
From JR's : articles
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