How Widgets Fit into the New Physics of News

One of our readers raised some salient points about our recent post “Google: A New Physics for the News.” The gist was that he likes to embed widgets from the Washington Post that dynamically update subjects that interest him on a web page or in his bookmarks. This yields the kind of  “narrative story buckets” envisioned in the post.

He is absolutely right that widgets contain this functionality, and by all means, users should take advantage of their presence on the web whenever practical.

He then went on to speculate whether investigative stories could be presented better in the format described in my post. The answer is a resounding “yes!” These long, well-documented articles have not made the transition easily from print to web yet, even though the web provides all kinds of tools not available in traditional media.

Start with the simplest and most obvious — hypertext links. Investigative reporters typically gather ten times as much data as they can actually publish, and much of it ends up filed away in boxes that grow dusty with age and neglect. Online, reporters can and do link directly to the materials that they cite in their articles.

Reports, filings, court records, videos, audio interviews, book excerpts — you name it, we can and should link to it. This also helps with attaining transparency, which in turn helps boost a reporter’s credibility. If your readers can evaluate the information you’ve based your report on for themselves, that should only build your reputation, assuming you’ve done a good job at extracting the meaning from documents and interviews, and not just the sound bytes!

But our reader also wondered aloud about the DRM issues raised by the scenario I laid out. It is true that there are some thorny digital rights management issues involved in who owns this material over time. My sense is that we are moving into an environment where not only the publisher but also the reporter will share these rights in perpetuity.

In other words, my publisher may maintain one set of rights over my articles, and hopefully will make money off of them, long after I’ve moved on. But I also can republish my own work easily on a personal web page or blog. Then, I can add new content every day, and make it a robust repository (that earns money) every bit as easily as can the publisher.

Plus, as the content creator, only I can add my “voice” back into the narrative arc as the story develops over time. Therefore, the publisher’s version and my version will diverge over the long run and search engines will be able to determine which repository is more “alive” and appreciated by the readers.

But, you may object, how can a lone writer compete with a huge news organization? My answer is simple: You don’t have to. All you need to compete over is a single slice of living content. Honestly, in an open competition between a highly motivated writer and a bureaucracy, I like the writer’s odds every single time.