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:* "Plug and Play Journalism" - 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:

bq.. 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.

It's easier to do data journalism around hard numbers. It's harder around social issues which are much more fungible but all stories still have facts, quotes, etc. It's just not organized. When journalists write an article, tags are an afterthought. In our CMS you are tagging it as you go. It's part of the process. 

The other thing which is interesting there is constraints. An article is a big box. There are no constraints. On Circa you have a choice. You can add a fact, stat, quote, event or image. There is no opinion entry. There is no analysis entry. Those constraints actually help our editorial process. They guide us. We might be able to go further later on and create entities.

In Circa every fact, quote and event has a citation. 

Another thing which would be cool to do down the line is corrections. At best you either write a new article or you go to your old article and write “correction” somewhere. Because we can keep track of exactly what you have read, what fact or what quote, when we get a fact wrong we can let everyone who read that story know.

In fact, one of the things I have always said is that all of the atomic units are facts. There's a statistic, a numerical fact, an event which is a fact in time and place, an image and a quote, the fact that someone said something. We don't quote talking heads. We quote someone who is in a position of power. 

There is an element of truth in that. It is important for someone to gorge on 4000 words, and there is value in it, but someone who follows Syria on Circa touches it pretty much every day. Someone following that story, I would argue, has a greater awareness of what is happening in Syria than someone who reads 4000 words and then never touches it again. 

The Boston one is a great example. It started off like a regular Monday. We put up one point (Circa’s term for a news atom). A good proportion of people who read the story followed it. Every time we did a push we would see an instant spike. The session time decreased with every update. That makes sense since everything else they had already read. In aggregate they were spending more time in the app but each session was shorter and shorter.

Since newspapers first started to print, the basic unit of news has been the article, an unstructured blob of data. A news article contains standard elements like a headline, quotes, facts and photos. It has a clear beginning and an end. To report a new fact, a journalist writes an entirely new article. Online news is not subject to the constraints of the paper page and the daily print run, but it still follows those basic tenets. 

Mobile news startup Circa has taken the radical step of ditching the linear article altogether. Circa’s founding editor David Cohn littered his presentation to journalists at the recent GEN News Summit with software development terms like forking and refactoring. It was hard to know whether he was describing a software or a news startup. Cohn says that’s exactly the point. Circa is making object-oriented news.

Circa is half a technology and half a media company. I head up the media half of it but the two are intimate with each other. At the very heart of it Matt, Ben and Arsenio, who are the three co-founders, pictured a GitHub for news. The idea of something evolving over time was incredibly important. Our CMS is organized around breaking news. We are not doing narratives. That's not to say that there is no value in the narratives. It's just not where we are putting our value.

We are not going to organize the news in articles. In most news organizations that's the unit and at best you can organize by topic. So we said 'What happens if you make the unit, this atomic unit of news, the fact – a stat, a quote, an image?' A quote can exist in multiple stories. This fact is an object and it can exist in several stories.

--(from the 1997 Steven Champeon post)-- Which brings me to what I believe will be the inevitable culmination of the journalistic world: Object Oriented Journalism. OOP is elegantly simple: rather than build large-scale Rube Goldberg systems based on branching causality, build large-scale systems based on independent modules with well-defined interfaces. Each object is considered to be a noun, capable of communication and self-reportage. 

Ultimately, the dream of OOP's proponents is that we will be able to buy widgets off-the-shelf, drop them into our system, and run, like you can with sunglasses or cola, or bicycle wheels. Even more importantly, we will be able to extend existing systems without rewriting them from scratch. We will look back on the way software is made today with the same fond nostalgia that we do with sausage production during the thirties. Or journalism in the nineties.

In Object Oriented Journalism, reporters will no longer need to comb the streets looking for eyewitnesses or reliable sources -- they will be able to buy them from large purveyors of journalistic objects. These objects will contain encapsulated factoids which may then be hyperinked together into brief stories, assemblages which lead the reader into ever-widening spheres of information. 

Need to cover a story about a murder in Muscongus, Maine? Grab the modules referring to Muscongus, Maine, the parties involved, the relevant histories of the police departments involved in the manhunt, the methods used to prove a murderer guilty or extract him or her from the clutches of foreign governments, the history of forensics, the effects of gunshot wounds on the human anatomy, the violent crime statistics for the area, nation and world, and so on. Voila.

The story exists, as do we all, less as a collection of objects and more as a pattern of relations between those objects. If the story programmer (or artist) responsible for creating the pattern (or story, or article) finds that another media giant can provide more in-depth information for the appropriate area of coverage, s/he can switch factoid providers at a whim. The danger here lies in the ever-present spectre of manipulation, bias, and revisionist history, but what else is new?

p. End excerpts.

New services to build stories:

* https://storify.com
* http://storyful.com