Comments on: Why we need to blow the article up in order to save it

By: jose

jose — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 02:36:25 +0000

Why on Earth would anyone listen to Jeff Jarvis opinion about anything. He’s being paid to promote high tech venture capital projects that involve “journalism”. Jarvis experience in the media business is that he was a TV critic years ago. The guy claims that he was in the World Trade Center yet 9/11 was not an inside job. Not sure if he’s living on the same planet as the rest of us?

By: John Pettitt

John Pettitt — Mon, 04 Jun 2012 04:36:33 +0000

On some levels I agree withe this article but on others I thin it misses a key point. We need to free the article from the site.

Youtube set video free by making it embeddable. However if you want to move an article you have to find a human and ask them (have you ever tried that? It’s almost impossible withe most sites).

This is why I built Repost.Us – we make whole articles embeddable just like video. We don’t need to blow up the article to save it we just need to set it free.

John

By: Tony Gallacher

Tony Gallacher — Sat, 02 Jun 2012 15:45:59 +0000

@Greg no, I was commenting on the main article.

I agree with Jeff Jarvis that there are more efficient ways to disseminate some factual information through the web. (I listen to him on This Week in Google and his take is generally good value.)

But I observed that the solution he proposes, for this problem, is very similar to (object-oriented) programming i.e. that articles should be constructed from what are essentially reusable blog fragments – or objects. That would change the nature of writing an article, making it more structured and similar to writing a program.

I don’t think it would work well for opinion pieces or those that tell the story of a news event.

By: Ann Rafalko

Ann Rafalko — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 17:04:50 +0000

I am no longer a journalist, but I still struggle with this everyday. I transferred my journalism experience to the world of cultural institutions, where trying to explain the full scope and concept of your exhibition is as equally challenging as getting people to care about CDSs. I think there needs to be a fundamental change in the way people write about things all around the internet, not just on news sites.

By: PGeorge

PGeorge — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 15:09:50 +0000

Jarvis makes his living being a media guru advising his media clients not to work with Apple and pushing his paid content theories. Any post with Jarvis mentioned usually is not worth a read.

By: Jürgen Messing

Jürgen Messing — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 08:02:14 +0000

Really, do we readers want to jump from one link to another to get the whole story? Do we? Perhaps via these context-less inline links I long ago rejected to follow because you never know where you land? No. We don’t.

I certainly disagree with Jarvis. A story is a self-contained unit of information I don’t want to re-aggregate as a reader or only want to get as crumbs of meaningless information. Of course, if it turns out that the story as such does not get recognized anymore through all the social media and SEO linking noise, it may happen that it disappears or moves to a (payed?) niche. But that’s not something I would actively enforce as a publisher who’s really good at telling stories, such as like GigaOM. I come to GigaOM directly via a bookmark on my PC because I know what sort and quality of stories I get here. So please leave the bombs in the shelf and do what you do so well: full-blown (in a sense of complete, not nuked) article and stories.

By: foremski

foremski — Thu, 31 May 2012 23:33:24 +0000

Makes sense. It’s similar to my proposal six years ago, to kill the press release and replace it with a collection of component parts, text, photos, videos, etc. “Die! Press Release! Die! Die! Die!” – http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2006/02/die_press_relea.php

By: John Koetsier

John Koetsier — Thu, 31 May 2012 19:29:19 +0000

Fascinating. And yet, there are different end-user modalities for different chunks: quick hits (Twitter while on the go), long-form (Slate or Atlantic when on a big screen at home), video (lunch-time when your hands are full), and so on and so on.

And they’re different for different people.

Aggregating them all is not the answer. Maybe, maybe, allowing (forcing) people to choose the modality they want is? Maybe intelligently presenting them based on user preferences, device, and location?

The only thing I think I know is that news will look very different 10 years from today.

By: Ron Wodaski

Ron Wodaski — Thu, 31 May 2012 18:55:42 +0000

Whether or not you get one chance to print something every day isn’t the relevant pivot. It’s the user who only takes one chance to read the content. The content is still the content; those pieces might exist in the mind of an editor who is putting the composite story together, but to the reader, it’s still a story, and it all has to be in one place at one time. Granted, some readers are evolving their readership, but we have a long way to go before that mode dominates all media. It’s more likely to work better in niches for now (Twitter comes to mind, but only for those paying attention to their feed). For most of us, ‘you’ the publisher get one shot, maybe two, per day. “Use it wisely” would be my advice. Feel free to supplement that for those who want information IV, but ‘on the record’ still exists in the reader’s mind and should be respected. There are opportunities available for latching on to a story (e.g., send me updates or at least notice of updates via email or Twitter), but they really need to be better than they are today. It should be possible to ‘latch on’ in a more focused and less obtrusive way, and no doubt there will be a patent for that yesterday.

By: nanokoan

nanokoan — Thu, 31 May 2012 17:23:49 +0000

The concept of article as a flexible configuration of various assets is amazing. Especially if navigating and exploring them would be intuitive (what is a big challenge). I believe that http://tiddlywiki.com/ is so far the best attempt for publishing that way, as the reader actually can shape his own way to interact with the content, grabbing the as much context and details as he needs. Even more amazing would be to completely divide the text content from the HTML structure (as it is now with media files) – so it could be easily reused as an asset somewhere else.