Dynamic News Stories
by Adrian Holovaty
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Pages: 1, 2
<time gmt="HH:MM:SS">
Speaking of time zones, news organizations should help readers in other time zones by clarifying time differences.
A Des Moines Register article may state that the mayor is planning a 2 p.m. press conference, but the reporter likely won't go out of her way to explain that it's 2 p.m. Central Time; the time zone is obvious to Des Moines readers. But website visitors from other parts of the world have to stop and think: "What time zone is Des Moines in? And how many hours away is that? What does 2 p.m. Des Moines time mean for me?" It's not optimized for global use.
The solution? A <time> tag that journalists could wrap around times. It would contain some normalized representation of the time: perhaps the time in GMT. Using that, publishing systems could output an explicit time zone declaration for out-of-town users, or perhaps even a time-zone converter next to each time.
<expire when="YYYY-MM-DD">
Some bits of news stories are only relevant for a certain amount of time. After that, they lose all value.
For example, it's kind of trendy for newspapers and their websites to cross-promote. A print newspaper might say, "For more on this story, check our website," and a website might say, "For more on this breaking-news story, see tomorrow's newspaper." In the Web-posted article, that latter text becomes useless the instant the next day's newspaper has been published. So, it'd be nice if that little teaser disappeared on a specified day and time.
Enter the <expire> tag, which editors would wrap around sentences whose value eventually expires.
This is a tricky one, though, because journalists have conflicting goals: displaying information that is currently accurate and information that will be historically accurate. One important function of a news article is to provide a historical record, so that in ten years a researcher can return to a news story and expect that its content has remained the same. But, at the same time, an important function of a web page is to display information that is up-to-date. It's unsettling, and it just feels messy, to read a message such as "See tomorrow's newspaper for more" in an article published a month ago.
<currency date="YYYY-MM-DD" units="USD">
Similarly, currency is a specific type of information whose value changes over time, namely due to inflation. A <currency> tag would let journalists signify that a certain monetary value is tied to a specific date, and this markup could trigger automated, on-the-fly adjustments for inflation when the news story is output on a web page, according to the date the article was viewed.
<city>
One particularly old-fashioned aspect of journalism style is the special-case treatment of certain cities. For example, according to the Associated Press stylebook, when a news story references "Chicago," it should not mention the state (Illinois), because the AP has deemed Chicago well-known enough that it has special status. The AP maintains a list of cities for which editors should leave off the state; any other city should be published with its state.
In addition, local newspapers have custom lists of nearby cities for which naming the state would be redundant, or even condescending! For example, at the Lawrence, Kansas newspaper, articles reference the nearby town of Tonganoxie without explicitly saying "Tonganoxie, Kan."
This sort of special-casing, which typically is verified by copy editors when they edit stories, is inefficient and doesn't scale to the worldwide readership of the Web.
So journalists should start using <city> tags, which would specify the full name and state of the cities in their stories. With that, the website's content-management system could specify some easy business logic defining which cities should be spelled out with states, and which cities could be published "stateless."
More ideas
I've only scratched the surface here. A few more ideas:
Automatic conversion: How about automatic conversions for units of temperature (Fahrenheit to/from Celsius), weight (pounds to/from kilograms) and distance (miles to/from kilometers)?
Isolating people and quotes: How about marking up each quote, and associating it with the person who said it, so it would be possible to automatically retrieve all quotes by a given person, and all articles in which a given person was quoted? For more, see Tagging quotes in a news story.
Isolating individual facts: This is a pipe dream, but how about giving each and every fact a unique ID, and doing things like <fact id="26" assumes-fact-id="27">? This would let journalists and readers create elaborate "fact trees," which could display the relationship between information. For more, see Microformats could describe online news intelligently.
So much of a traditional news article fundamentally assumes the story is intended for a person in the same town, on the same day, with the same cultural background. But the Web allows anyone to read news stories worldwide, and days or weeks after the fact, so journalists should start taking advantage of automation and smart markup to make news stories more valuable sources of information.
- granular story elements are possible and have great potential
2006-09-19 09:43:39 david_johnson - Creating news stories using Topic Maps
2006-05-30 06:54:45 dbv - Prism Standard
2006-05-27 08:45:30 Joe Germuska - Why Not Mark-up Even More?
2006-05-23 14:33:05 JuliaKM - They Do Have Structure
2006-05-18 06:09:35 Len Bullard - They Do Have Structure
2006-05-18 08:01:59 adrian_h - Fine fine fine
2006-05-17 12:33:56 benjamin.birkenhake
