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.
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- granular story elements are possible and have great potential
2006-09-19 09:43:39 david_johnson [Reply]
this is a very progressive and thought-provoking idea, adrian.
news stories do have definite items that could be parsed out or marked up as either meta or inside the story. of course there are obvious cliches that could enhance an abstract: <who> <what> <when> <where> <why> or even <peg>. but more useful to quick data retrieval would be items outside of the narrative like <fact> or <quote>, which could also have weighted subs like <source> or <reference> or <attribution>. you can then throw in tags like <analysis> <opinion> <commentary> or even get down to writing terminology like <nutgraf> <transistion> or <entry point> or even <color>.
We continue to talk about what technology does to changing theory and practice of newsgathering, reporting, and writing. I begin to wonder if we are nearing a new period in production of news content. Just as the telegraph and telephone changed the process flow of filing stories, might we benefit from having reporters collect and tag data and file it to the new, transparent rewrite desk.
A just-the-facts approach might have a strong effect against accusations of bias in the media.
- Creating news stories using Topic Maps
2006-05-30 06:54:45 dbv [Reply]
Another interesting approach is to use technologies such as Topic Maps to record a meaning of an event. In this case we start with defining URI for an event (not for an article, for an event). And we add as much assertions about this event as we want to. Additional assertions can be added later. Public URI for an event provides ability to merge information produced by different authors.
- Prism Standard
2006-05-27 08:45:30 Joe Germuska [Reply]
Are you familiar with PRISM? [1,2] It's an acronym for "Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata" and a lot of big players have signed on to it. Its section on "inline markup" shoots for some of the things you describe. (It also has a section on rights designations and another on controlled vocabularies.)
It's an enormous spec, extremely complicated, and possibly too big for its own good. I wonder if anyone has actually built anything upon it. (Maybe XML.com can assign someone to investigate and report back?)
Of course, the key to making something like this work would be automating the tagging. It wouldn't have to be perfect, as news institutions already have proofing and fact checking processes -- those same checks could validate a tagging pass by an automated process.
[1] http://www.prismstandard.org/
[2] http://xml.coverpages.org/prism.html
- Why Not Mark-up Even More?
2006-05-23 14:33:05 JuliaKM [Reply]
This is a great article. It seems like you could even go a step further and mark-up the actual paragraphs and sentences of the article into logical divisions. For instance, the first few relevant sentences could always be surrounded by a <lead> tag. I would imagine that online news producers would appreciate the opportunity to just pull the first relevant sentences in an article.
- They Do Have Structure
2006-05-18 06:09:35 Len Bullard [Reply]
You can't count on it being right particularly in web articles where the majority of authors are amateurs, but a well-written news story does have a structure known as the inverted pyramid.
http://www.teachervision.fen.com/journalism/writing/6042.html
The problem is that no text is actually unstructured. It may be untagged or unprofessional.
- They Do Have Structure
2006-05-18 08:01:59 adrian_h [Reply]
You're right that many articles use inverted pyramid, but feature articles tend not to. Another popular style is the "Wall Street Journal feature" style, in which you start with a story and don't get to the main point until about 5 paragraphs in.
- They Do Have Structure
- Fine fine fine
2006-05-17 12:33:56 benjamin.birkenhake [Reply]
This is a really fine approach. I actually love it. I'm not a journalist anyway, but I know that HTML is just hot air in tags. Some Headings, some paragraphs - if our understanding of what "text" is, is represented by HTML we are a very poor culture.
So I vote for your suggestion an further more markup. Markup for the masses! Markup persons, places, movies, books, albums. Markup section you especially like, dislike. Markup arguments for or against something. Everyone should be able to markup what ever he or she thinks is important to him or her.
Thank you!
