Digital Archives & the Content Strategist:
Curation properly begins with a mission statement, whether you’re a content creator or a researcher assembling resources: What is it you are trying to say? What does your collection represent?
Tag: content
Listening to @informative talk about content strategy at the WordPress meetup tonight. The approach of first considering what questions your content has to answer seems particularly useful for support documentation. By laying the groundwork for questions first, it makes the writing more effective.
As the online editor, I s…
As the online editor, I sometimes feel like my job is to make something beautiful, just to hack it apart for kindling. Here’s the way I (mostly) think about it instead: any link to a fragment of LQ is a breadcrumb that can bring you back to the whole. Every magazine wants to lead you back to the mothership, but when you finally pick up an issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, what you have isn’t the end of your own curation and the beginning of our vision. It’s the start of a new reading in a closed-off sphere that also resembles the web you came from: a rabbit hole of thought that you’ll gladly fall into.
Michelle Legro – History and Its Contents.
Sweep the Sleaze. Our sites don’t need 37 pieces of flair.
On Content: less is more. Sean Blanda nails it here. Great set of guidelines for any writer to aspire to. I wish more publications understood and followed these ideas.
The Dirt on Editorial Calendars. Tips for making the most of editorial calendars. Ties in nicely with the updated version of Edit Flow released today. Lots of improvements to the calendar in that release.
The Value of Content, Part 1: Adam Smith never expected this. Melissa Rach takes a look at how content on the web defies traditional models of economics. In part 2 she explains the basics of effectively communicating the value of content. Sections 2 and 3 of Part 2 are particularly good. Part 2 is here.
What it’s like to share an article from one of these iPad magazines. Neven Mrgan nails it on why sharing content from iPad magazine apps is a big bucket of fail. It’s almost like they don’t want you to tell your friends about great content. (via Ben Brooks)
Mother Jones, Egypt, and liveblogging
I just got around to reading the entirety of the Mother Jones updates on what’s happening in Egypt. If you haven’t seen it yet it’s a treasure trove of information, thanks to Daniel for the link.
Partly due to the fact that it’s such a great resource it leaves me wanting for a better way to track updates on it. What Mother Jones, and a lot of news organizations, have done for their live blogs is create a single post that has many revisions and additions. This gets the information out there while also providing a single place to turn to for updates and back story.
This method works but it leaves a bit to be desired. What’s missing is the ability to track updates as separate news items.
Permalink the updates
Mother Jones has hacked around the inability to reference single updates to the post by adding in anchors for each day’s worth of updates. Here’s Monday for example. This works but is far from a true solution. When Mother Jones publishes an update the entire post is sent out via RSS with the most recent update all the way at the bottom.
The format also means that we have no way to link into their coverage. There is an anchor for each day in the text but I want granularity. I should be able to specify a single update they’ve pushed as something worth reading.
The Guardian’s live blog does a bit better of a job at this. Each update is prefaced with an update-level permalink that will take you right there. They even add a nice touch with the pop-up window there that gives you the link pre-selected.
A better live blog
A live blog should be just that, a fully functional blog with multiple posts that each have a permalink. Otherwise it’s just a post that’s added to over and over again.
Were Mother Jones to turn their Egypt coverage into a true live blog they’d hit these 3 improvements:
- Entry-level permalinks: Every entry would have a unique permalink that would allow readers to link deeply into the organization’s coverage.
- Granularity in updates: By breaking each update into a single entry it would allow each update to be sent out via any number of media. Combine this with the ability to subscribe to new updates in RSS, Jabber, Email, Twitter, etc. and you have a news organization that can push updates to you anywhere.
- Attention of users: I can more easily parse out new information in a complex event like Egypt when every update does not also include the full back story. Keep the broader context available for new readers but allow your repeat users the ability to skip over what they have already read.
Ultimately the updates to an event and the back story need to be separated out. You wouldn’t verbatim republish yesterday’s story with one new paragraph in print so I’m not sure why it flies online. Your RSS feed is your distribution channel, the more repeated noise you push through there the more likely I’ll tune it out.
Updates and context are both important but to stay on top of a fast-moving event new information ought to be easily separable while maintaining a broader compendium of everything that makes up the back story of the event.
Frank Chimero on content
A stellar essay from Frank Chimero on content (as told through the metaphor of watery soup).
You ever order soup at a restaurant and get a bowl that’s mostly broth?
The problem is the register at the restaurant is four-hundred bucks under what it was the day before, and everyone is running around screaming “No one wants to buy our soup!” Then they start looking for different ways to distribute the soup. Do they buy new ladles? Would people like it if the ladles were fancier? “Let’s buy new bowls. People would enjoy the new bowls,” they say. Customers could choose the bowl that best fits their personality, or how they’re feeling that day, or whether they’re having the soup for lunch or for dinner.
Pretty fun to substitute “news” for “soup” throughout the post. Reminded me of an earlier article about news systems trying to pass off watery broth.