Notes on Modular News

Why is this even needed?


In the not too distant past:
Strictly separated information carriers
  • Content types technology/device specific
    • Newspaper, amagzine: text, image
    • Radio: audio
    • Television: video (audio)
  • Monolithic and/or linear content
  • Story centric
  • not interoperational
  • not interactive
  • not personalized
"One size fits all."

1:1 transfer of iconography and the inherent paradigms to digital content:
Only the device had changed, not the structure of the content itself.

[Paper, Radio and Tv → Desktop Computer].

Doesn't scale anymore.

News content / publication is a push request. Drastically changed landscape: Age of Digital Ubiquity
  • The quantity of information exploded
    • vs. unchanged capacity of human attention
  • Different needs of media consumption
    • Use-case related [situation, device, ...]
    • Targetgroup related [age, educational level, ...]
  • Large variety of different platforms and devices
    • highly fragmenting the ways news are consumed
Some implications
  • Separate editing from writing
  • Structure driven
    • Content is directly accessible to computation on meta-level
    • Hyper-personalized
    • Use-case dependent re-assembled
    • Highly interoperational
  • Content artefacts become permanent & cumulative
    • No distinction between current content [news] and archive
    • Content artefacts become subject to collective refinement over time
Structuring ≠ simple tagging

Metajournalism: Create stories in the data of the stories

In order to curate stories that scale, adopt and connect across platforms and use-cases.

News content / publication is a pull request.