Far too often, news sites under leverage their data or they don’t even bother to store the data in a structured, machine-readable way. It’s not about recreating the newspaper experience online with those wacky Web 2.0 features thrown in for the fun of it.

It is the journalist’s job to provide context to facts, to string important bits of related data together in a way humans can quickly understand. We call these stories and they work great–for humans. 

Stories are a terrible way to store information. As much as we like to imagine computers with super-intelligent capabilities, they don’t compare to the human brain. Even the most advanced artificial intelligence is only slightly smarter than a rock rolling down a hill. Computers have great difficulty interpreting complex data. At best, they can merely process data and leave the interpretation to us.

Here’s an example: We can read a story and parse out the who, what, where, when, why and how. We can then take that information and apply it to other information we know about the world. We can read an article about Jim Cramer on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and place that new information in other contexts; We can near-instantaneously access our knowledge of the financial crisis, journalism ethics, comedy, the personal histories of Jim Cramer and Jon Stewart, and the recent clash between The Daily Show and CNBC and apply broader knowledge to this particular story, enhancing not only our understanding of this particular story, but also our broader knowledge of its context. Where we run into new information we can’t put into context, we deduce and interpolate. Context is an extremely simple process for you and me. Humans are fantastic at finding patterns (we even find them where none exist).

Most software can’t create context without help. To a machine, that story is just a string of  characters attached to an ID number that separates this story from others. When you click a link to an article, the application doesn’t think “Oh this user is interested in The Daily Show,” it thinks “This user requested an article with a unique ID from my database that contains this string of alpha-numeric characters.” The application fulfills the request and then moves on to the next task. 

If there were two articles in the database about The Daily Show (each with a different ID number), the application wouldn’t have the slightest clue they were related. We need to provide that kind of context.

The simplest way to provide granular context is through tagging and meticulous categorization.

 Here’s another example: Most news sites break their content into a few categories. Let’s imagine a site with three categories: news, sports and opinion. Now the computer can “understand” three types of stories. It can’t really understand, but it can differentiate. Story with ID number 11 belongs in News, which is category 1. Story with ID number 22 belongs in Sports, which is category 2. Story number 33 is Opinion, which belongs in category 3. When a user clicks on News, the application organizes all the story ID numbers that are also in category 1. With the right database structure, one story in the database could be attached to all three categories. 

This categorization can get deeper and a lot of sites do dig deeper in their categorization. The Star Tribune has categories for all the major sport teams. The Chicago Tribune breaks down their columnists into news, business, etc. But they could do even more still. Each team is made up of people, places and things.  Each story contains those people, places and things. The who, what, where, when, why is all meta data that a computer can “read,” if stored in a structured way.

Here’s the key point I’m trying to make: By storing data in this way, you can exponentially increase the number of pages on your site, without actually creating more content. Leverage your data in a more efficient way.

Returning to The Daily Show article, if we stored this type of meta data about what that article was about, we could write an application that searches all our other content for related information. Not just for all stories about The Daily Show or all stories about Jim Cramer, but you could weight the page a user is already on against all other stories about both The Daily Show and Jim Cramer or all other stories about the financial and journalism ethics. More context available to the user immediately.  

If you had enough stories about The Daily Show, you could spin that data into a separate site, using the same tables. If you had several newspapers in different markets writing about the same topics, you could easily leverage that data into an aggregate site. You could create granular feeds for each piece of meta data. And so much more.

And that’s just leveraging the content. News sites are full of other data:  User information, advertising information, the list goes on. 

Let’s assume I’m me and you’re you. I read the Jim Cramer/Daily Show story and also a story about a new bar near my house. You live in the same neighborhood as me and read the story The Daily Show story. With the right data, an application could be written to suggest the bar story to you, because we share the same location and interest in The Daily Show story. Think Netflix recommendation engine for news. 

From an advertising perspective, this kind of data leveraging is huge. If I’m a sporting good store I don’t want to sell my brand, I want to sell my inventory. An article about Twins catcher Joe Mauer could feature an ad pitching Mauer jerseys, while the article about the new bar could feature drink specials. If my user profile says I’m interested in the White Sox, the sporting good store ad probably wouldn’t be effective in trying to get me to buy the Mauer jersey and would pitch something else, but the bar ad might want to tell me to enjoy the game against the Twins tonight with half-off taps.

Now, instead of selling one ad to the bar and one ad to the sporting good store, you’ve sold two ads (with presumably lower initial buy in cost, but higher overall CPM or CPC) with their message tailored to the right people and kept the rest of your advertising inventory available for ads more effective for other businesses. The point is that advertising contains meta data, too, you just have to store it so the machines can better differentiate.

Contextual advertising doesn’t have to be the Google approach, with spiders to crawling pages and keyword algorithms weighting context. It can be as simple as a relational table in a database and some elbow grease from editorial, advertising and users to create maintain the data. That’s the Achilles heel of the Google approach. Google’s robots have difficulty understanding tone. An article slamming Microsoft might still serve an ad for Microsoft Office, based on keyword density. Computers are stupid. People, presumably, are not.

In my next post in this series, I’ll break out a bunch of flow charts describing behavioral, social and contextual delivery methods. From there, we’ll further discuss ways to scale up.

Twitter is abuzz tonight with the failure of Denver media to properly cover Continental Airlines Flight 1404 veering off the runway. There were all kinds of posts to twitter about it tonight, for HOURS before local media bothered to get anything posted to their sites.

For future reference, it took me about 30 seconds of Googling to find a widget like the one below that aggregates twitter posts based on keywords. This is YET ANOTHER example of the failure of local media to properly aggregate information about their markets. For fear of someone saying something stupid or uncouth, the Post dropped the ball. And it fell hard.

I apologize for the gap between posts. It’s been a busy summer for me.

In my last post I shared many tools newsrooms can use to keep track of each other out in the field. The point of the list is to show you how you can communicate away from your desk with lots of sources and many editors. There’s absolutely no reason a reporter or editor can’t work exclusively in the field today.

Today I want to discuss workflow. Specifically integrating news workflow into an online ecosystem.

The Internet is an ecosystem. Like all ecosystems, the more diversity the more healthy the entire ecosystem.

The same is true of stock portfolios. Diversity is a good thing. A truly diverse portfolio will better weather disaster if one stock takes a dive.

Ecosystems rely on symbiotic relationships amongst fauna and flora, creepies and crawlies. The Web, too, relies on the generosity of others. A single Web site is only as strong as its network.

If I were to build a news center from scratch, this is how it would happen. There is not necessarily a need for a clearinghouse of information. Readers have many ways to discover your content. Mixing relevant content with content that is highly likely to be irrelevant to a reader is bad news. Eggs in one basket and all that.

The Internet is my platform. Not a Web site. Not twitter. Not mobile devices. The entire Internet.

1. All reporters, columnists, editors and photographers would blog their beat(s). No exceptions. The blogs would be hosted on their own domains and the bloggers would be responsible for the growth of the sites. These bloggers should use as many services as possible to grow their communities.
2. Editors should cull the best and most interesting content from the beat blogs into niche sites. Let’s say we have five features reporters (Faith, Nightlife, Arts, Columns and Gardening) and one feature photographer. You then have a recipe for a local life Web site. They should be content hubs by also aggregating related information from around the Web. Attach paid items like Obits and personals with other forms of advertising and you have a site with low overhead, possibly high returns. Editors are responsible for the growth of these sites.
3. ‘Brand’ sites (The general news place where still too many newspapers are posting today’s newspaper) should gauge which stories from the niche sites and blogs require follow ups and more in-depth coverage. From there the blogs and niche sites link back and we can begin to see how the Internet feeds on itself.
4. A media group would be wise to further aggregate content. If a group has 30 newspapers and a TV station, chances are there’s much overlap in types of content. Further aggregation would mean a wider community to tap.
5. Meta data is required of all content. At the very least this means properly tagging content.
6. Advertising should sell the network. (Example: I could buy an general run of network ad, a run of site ad on a specific site, or I could buy impressions based on certain meta-data across multiple sites)

I’ve created an information ecosystem.

1. The essential production of news hardly changed. Information still flows from source to reporter to editor to audience, but the audience and advertisers are given multiple access points. These access points allow for editors and the community to put a check on bad coverage, but it also creates a situation where a media company has complete ownership of the news online from start to finish.
2. Multiple sites means lots of diversity. Diversity means lots of links which ensure the health of the entire system. The community at a politics niche site would benefit from an environmental issues blogger where the two subjects intersect.
3. Diversity also means that if one product doesn’t meet expectations, it doesn’t bring the rest of the system down with it. If a gardening blog fails, it only affects the few readers of that gardening blog. The only advertisers affected would be advertisers looking to buy ads on that specific blog, but they still have options if they’re willing to take impressions solely from the blogs archives and the niche site archives. But if they buy ads based on the gardening meta data, other blogs that feature that content type still keep the impressions rolling.
4. Plenty of room for growth. The advertising network can easily expand to accommodate other sites (presumably discovered via the beat bloggers) through revenue sharing. Much of the aggregation could be automated or built into push button solutions.

To me, this is what a newsroom should look like today. It should be many small pieces loosely joined via links. It should have granular relevance and it should be mass at the same time. Give your newsroom the tools and they will create the links.

Part One: Streamlining the minutia of reporting

Will Sullivan’s recent post about getting more done with less reminded me about this post I’ve had sitting in my draft queue for too long.

This two-part series will cover tools to help make mobile, Web-first reporting and editing more efficient. I’m not going to cover gear in either post. What gear you use doesn’t matter. You only need two pieces of equipment to get started: A decent Web-enabled cell phone and a laptop.

In order to truly become a mobile newsroom, internal communication becomes much, much more important. The first post in this series deals with how to build an internal communication infrastructure. It will help reporters stay on top of their sources and help editors stay on top of what their reporters and other editors are working on. The second post will deal with how to radically transform your news gathering process, generate more traffic and discussion on your sites and build better, more relevant top-tier products.

I chose the following because many of these services have tight integration with each other and they’re either free or incredibly cheap, but feel free to mix and match to suit your needs. The point is simply to get out and report and get away from your desk to do it.

Some of these services will make your process more transparent. Some people won’t like that, but trust me for now when I say transparency is a good thing for business and reporting. I’ll offer some reasons why in my next post.

Firefox

This may seem obvious, but we often miss the painfully obvious. If you’re serious about mobile journalism, you need a browser that gives you plenty of flexibility. Internet Explorer doesn’t cut it. There are also many Firefox extensions for the services I’m going to talk about. Take advantage of them. Your browser is your new desk. Download Firefox now. Also check out the portable Firefox client which can run off a thumb drive or iPod.

ADrive

ADrive gives you 50 gigs of free online storage (Yes, 50 gigs). I wouldn’t count on ADrive lasting long, what with OmniDrive’s collapse. Keeping files in a central place where others can grab them speeds things up.

If you have your own server space with a common FTP log in, fine. Grab FileZilla (and the portable version) and go to town. That’s probably more secure than the Java application on the ADrive site. But, if you need cheap space (I’d use ADrive for getting raw audio and video to an editor back at the office), this solution will get you up and running TODAY.

del.icio.us

Del.icio.us, the social bookmarking site, keeps links out of email. I can’t stand those mass-emailed-hey-look-what-I-found links because email is for communicating work-related tasks that are too long, or less immediate than instant messenger. Nothing more.

Del.icio.us moves those links out of sight. While I think we should share information we find with each other (and it’s a culture we should encourage), we need to move it to the appropriate arena.

Del.icio.us has a couple FireFox plugins that speed up bookmarking items.

There are several ways to integrate your del.icio.us bookmarks into your site as well, to create a link blog of sorts.

Google Reader

Almost everything has RSS feeds these days. Keep up on your beat by following related blogs, or follow news releases (which are cropping up more and more often in RSS format) or hunt down the XML feeds that happen to be all over government Web sites (They may not be obvious, but they can be found anywhere).

Gmail

Sullivan covers this best in his post:

Corporate policies and IT concerns will never allow email on a third party system. Well, they can cram it with walnuts. The paper tiger of ’security’ is false, we’ve all heard people use that before when they just wanted to maintain unfettered, unquestioned control. Microsoft’s product vulerabilities are widely known and have been the target of hackers, spyware, malware and viruses since the dawn of the Internet. Beyond that, Outlook is purely a waste of money, including time (and therefore money) spent dealing with inept software. That time-as-money waste is almost as gross as the mountains of cash spent on the proprietary software that is causing this time suck. It’s a vicious circle.

Plus, if you’re lucky enough to have a Web-client version of outlook, you know how much it sucks.

Gmail’s filtering, offline access and built-in instant messaging keeps you organized, freeing you up to get work more work done.

There’s also an excellent mobile Web version if you’re away from a computer.

I also use Gmail as a personal database.

Gmail integrates tightly with Remember The Milk (which I’ll get to in a bit).

Google Docs

Sullivan also covers Docs in his post, but I’d like to add that Docs means not buying expensive front-end systems, as well.

Docs isn’t just a writing tool. You can publish directly to your blog from the software or let your Web developers take the data for fun mashups using Google’s APIs (like this crime map I made a while back).

Google Calendar

Manage multiple calendars (events, deadlines, personal meetings, schedules) from one space. Share and collaborate. Text and email alert reminders. Access it online with your full browser, or use their handy mobile Web interface. It also integrates with Remember The Milk.

Again, email should be used for relaying complex tasks, not for figuring out when everyone is available for a meeting. At a quick glance with Gcal, you can see who is available when and set up a meeting invitation right from the software.

Sold yet?

Grand Central

If you’re going to be truly mobile, people need to get a hold of you. Grand Central is another Google product, so there’s great integration with other Google applications.

Here’s what it is: One phone number that rings all of your phones. Access any voice mail from any phone. Record calls and download them for posting to the Web later (no annoying gear required!).

Grand Central basically turns telephones into Gmail. There are more than enough features to make it worth a look. Personally, I like the call filtering the best. Incoming calls from certain people ring different phones.

Flickr

All photographers should be using a pro flickr account. Period.

Why spend thousands on front-end photo systems when for less than a few hundred bucks a year you can give every person in your newsroom who even touches a camera a full account? Through tagging and RSS, you can create dynamic workflows between photographers and photo editors. Using flickr’s tools and their API, your developers can immediately post images to your sites with almost zero lag time. You also tap flickr’s massive audience.

Lastly: You can control your copyright how you see fit.

LinkedIn

Professional social networking. Many professionals already have an account, but if you don’t, get a free account. The mobile interface is handy for looking up contacts that may not be in your Grand Central list.

Jott

With only a voice call, post to your blog or twitter, set Google calendar events, create tasks in Remember the Milk. Jott is great for posting quick bits right from your phone when you don’t have a good Internet connection.

Remember the Milk

Lists. That’s all this service does. Sounds silly, but the collaboration tools take the lists to another level. Editors can see what you’re working on, while assigning quick tasks and deadlines. And that information can be fed back to a boatload of services (the twitter/jott integration being the most useful to me, personally). With so many features you can easily defeat the object of having prioritization lists, but with some discipline and solid work flow, it becomes an invaluable tool for setting reminders and prioritizing the minutia of newsroom life.

Twitter/BrightKite

Twitter is a microblogging tool. BrightKite is a location tool that integrates with twitter.

Twitter and BrightKite have been covered pretty extensively by media bloggers, so I’m not going to bore you with more. Just know that these tools will let your editors (and readers) know what you are working on and where you are in the field.

(I have some invites to BrightKite, which is in beta, if you’d like to see it. Leave a comment if you want one.)

Ning

Every reporter and editor should have a Ning network. They should build an online relationship with their sources, their readers and their editors. Beatblogging.org covers this extensively and it’s a principle I firmly stand behind.

Also consider creating a closed network for your newsroom. Consider it a free intranet/social network that can be accessed anywhere and can become a central hub of information flowing into the news desk.

Any good blogging platform

WordPress and tumblr are my favorite flavors, but if you can find a robust blogging platform that works with Google Docs, Jott and others listed above–and they work for your newsroom–go for it. At the very least, every reporter and editor should have a blog covering their beat(s). I’ll get into this more in my next post, but the flow of information should move from source to blog to aggregation sites (like a targeted niche sites or general news sites).

—

Any other suggestions are certainly welcome in the comments!

The second part of this series will specifically address editorial workflows. Once you have reporters out in the field, producing their own beat blogs, then what do you do? I’ll bring up some ideas I’ve been running through my head for a while.

There’s been complaining about conversation leaving the blogosphere for a few weeks. I’ve written my thoughts here, but I fear bloggers have been falling back to old media ways, especially bloggers who try to make a living as conversationalists.

Let’s move on from ridiculous statements like these: “If they ever pull my feed and use it there, they can expect to get hit with a DMCA take-down notice.” Syndication is a good thing for your brand in any form. Who cares whether the conversation happens at your blog, some other blog in response to you or at a water cooler in a lonely New Jersey office park?

I’m releasing all rights to my content to the public domain.

If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ll notice that this is a logical conclusion. I’m a Cluetrainer; Conversations happen everywhere, but technology lets us see the scale of that conversation that we, as mass media, didn’t previously have access to. I’m a big proponent of Information Architects‘ idea that our content is our brand.

Zenhabits did this not too long ago, so in the spirit of public domain, here’s what Leo had to say:

From now on, there is no need to email me for permission. Use it however you want! Email it, share it, reprint it with or without credit. Change it around, put in a bunch of swear words and attribute them to me. It’s OK.

Credit and payment
While you are under no obligation to do so, I would appreciate it if you give me credit for any work of mine that you use, and ideally, link back to the original.

My sentiments exactly. If you want to make money off my content here, fine. I don’t care. I care less about intellectual property and more about intellect and the free flow of ideas. If you want to talk about my posts elsewhere, go for it. I’m glad for it.

Only the stuff that is mine is public domain, obviously. Where noted, other’s content isn’t under public domain (duh). The site template belongs to iA.

Last Monday I made a guest appearance at a reporting class in town. I speak to students fairly regularly lately, but usually on quick topics like Web writing, video or multimedia and the like. This time I got a good hour and 45 minute conversation with a couple j-school professors and a small reporting class that had some great questions.

This conversation started with a 15 minute presentation about the state of the media. I didn’t talk about specifics like video or multimedia or programming. I explicitly avoided those topics. I wanted to have a conversation about conversations. I wanted to talk about how conversation and mass media can be the same thing on the Web.

We covered some topics like blogging, how people can commit acts of journalism without being “citizen journalists” and some tough issues our industry faces. We talked about how the act of searching narrows your scope as a news consumer, creating a tunnel vision that ignores the bigger picture. We talked about how technologies like tagging can increase the scale of that narrow scope and how it can lead to pivot points to other conversations.

It went over very well, I think. I was on top of my game when asked tough questions.

But one question came up that I think I stumbled on: What can journalism students do to help themselves get jobs after they graduate?

I mumbled something about LinkedIn and I said start a blog, immediately, but I should have been much more specific: I didn’t mean that you should start a blog to learn how blogs and the Internet works. We grew up with this. Point and click. Easy. I trust (and expect) you’ve gotten at least that far. I meant: Start a blog to network with others in the industry.

There’s a big difference between a blog that you use to grow a larger audience and a blog that you use for networking.

1. A networking blog should be a living document of your professional self. You should stay focused on topics that matter to people who may hire you. You should start reading blogs from people in your field.
2. When someone makes you think, you should think out loud on your site. Have a conversation with others. Email people questions. Chat with them on twitter. Get to know people. Working a blog isn’t much different than working a room at a conference. Stay focused.
3. Show off your work. When you do something good, show it off. Don’t be bashful.
4. SEO the crap out of yourself. When you apply for a job, the first thing most people do is Google your name. If your MySpace shows up with some compromising pictures, that puts you at a disadvantage. I don’t think you should have to take down those photos (with a bit of digging, I’m sure you can find some videos of me doing the drunken robot somewhere), but make sure your best stuff is at the top of the results page.
5. Seize every opportunity you can. When I talk to people about Creative Commons and copyright, I talk about a student who sent The Forum photos from Northwood, ND. A tornado ravaged the small town last summer and Forum Communications had multiple properties covering the news. One student drove up to the site and started taking photographs. He took some great pictures and then he put them in front of us. We used some on In-Forum. On Monday, just as I was about to break into this spiel, a student in the back of the room told it for me. I had the fortune of finally putting a face to the photos. So:
6. Always remember that there’s a real human being on the other side of the machine.

This post is a tutorial on how to make a simple photo gallery that also displays locations on a Google map. It’s intended for the Wired Journalists community. If you’d like to learn how to do more cool journalism projects with the Web, sign up now!

One of The Forum’s photographers came to me with a project at the beginning of the year. She was starting a weekly photo column in the paper, snapshots of people in the community and she wondered what we could do to give it a good presentation online.

“Let’s put them on a map!”

Here’s the result.

I always argue for more information and I tend to see photo captions with locations or approximate locations. That’s data. That’s very useful data when you imagine it in relation to other photos.

Since Ann’s project was going to be weekly, I figured we add the “where” data as another way to discover the photos. Over time, you’d get a broader picture of how the images relate to one another.

While I argue for putting more information out there for your readers, I also don’t like asking the development team for help programming one-off projects (we have a small team and this was a “want to have” project not a “need to have”). The nice thing about this project is that we can host nearly all the media and have complete control over the data in Google’s KML file so if we chose to port it for deeper integration into our sites, we could do that rather painlessly.

So, I went out in search of free mapping tools. This project only uses My Maps from Google and  MapChannels.

Let’s get to the nuts and bolts.

First, you need photos, captions and addresses. You’ll also need a Google account and a free account at MapChannels.

Upload all your photos to your host and make note of their URLs. You could even upload them to a free photo service like flickr. They just need to be online, because Google Maps doesn’t offer hosting. Once you get all that together head over to Google Maps.

Click on the My Maps tab and create a new map.

Enter the address of the first photo.  In the bubble that shows up with the pin, there’s a “Save to My Maps” link. Click it and select the map where you’d like to save the location. The bubble will turn into a couple of fields.

Click the image button on the bubble and paste in the photo URL that corresponds to the location you’ve set. You can resize photos under the Edit HTML tab. Add text, HTML (embed flash videos too!), add links, etc. You can change the color or type of the pin by clicking on the pin in the bubble. Google has quite a few predetermined pins, but you can also add your own 64×64 pixel pin here if you’d like.

Repeat for all your photos.

Now here, if you want to embed the map as is to your site, just click the “Link to this page” above the map on the right side. A window will appear with two options, one of which is an iframe you can paste into the page.

For what we’re trying to accomplish, I’m not to thrilled with the result.  The pins don’t tell you much about their contents.

That’s what MapChannels helps us with. Before we head over there, right click / copy link location of the “View in Google Earth” link. You’ll need that in a minute or two.

Don’t be turned off by how hideous the MapChannels site looks. The tools it has are pretty powerful and they’re free. Register for an account if you haven’t already.

Once logged in, click the “Create New Map Channel” link (upper right side of the page; it’s yellow).

In the data source field, paste the “View in Google Earth” link you saved earlier.

Give your map channel a name in the second field, agree to the terms and conditions and you’re almost there.

Here you’ll find tons of features. Play around with them to get your desired look.

For the in view map linked at the top of this article, all I did was changed the sidebar width, making it wide enough for the content and change “Info Window Type” to Zoom and Sidebar. I also deselected all the map channel links in the sidebar.

Copy the iframe code to your site and you’re done. Simple as that.

You can read the tutorials here for more on how to host all the scripts and other collateral on your own site, giving you some room to monkey with the functions at a more advanced level.

I’m taking a bit of a cue from my micro-blog with this short post, but Everyblock’s Paul Smith has an interesting post up on why they decided to create their own maps. Rex Sorgatz has a great interview with Everyblock’s Holovaty if you haven’t read it yet.

Web teams and especially their publishers need to start thinking about raw data as useful content, instead of simply data from newspapers (i.e. photos and text) as content.

Something like Everyblock could be monetized on a micro level very easily (think lots of small dollars), and with an integration that would be super useful (rather than simply annoying) from a user perspective. Think if you could integrate a LJWorld style marketplace with super local user generated content streams, your own classifieds, your own news items (particularly crime) and government data sources. Maps and freely available data could be the pivot point for all your other content.

Now that’s completely rethinking how news works.

If there’s one thing I hate about newspaper writing it’s that we spend so much space repeating what we’ve already written.

If there’s two things I hate about newspaper writing it’s that we don’t spend enough space explaining what we’ve already written about.

We too often have a case of too much or too little.

This is why tagging your content matters so much.

I know it’s a simple thing, we see these little guys all the time on the Web, except on many news sites. It needs to be the top priority for your editorial strategies.

When you write a story about X subject and then follow up on X subject repeatedly, it’s incredibly useful for your readers to easily follow the history of the story or find related content. Those tags, not repeating paragraphs, add breadth to your content.

We still think in terms of sections as buckets. You have a news bucket and a business bucket and a lifestyle bucket and we cram content into one of those buckets, no matter how ambiguous the story may be. What if you have an article about the iPhone? It could fit in all three buckets. Plus a technology bucket, plus a bucket specifically for Apple, Inc. Tagging allows you put one piece of content into many buckets.

News has a short shelf life. Tagging every piece of content gives those older pieces new life, in context of the broader picture. It turns every article page into a targeted mini-homepage. It uses the power of databases to aid in relevant serendipity, meaning your users find extra information based on their interests that led them to that original item.

This seems so incredibly simple, so why don’t more news sites do it? Why are we still stuck thinking in terms of traditional section buckets?

Last week, while staying with family in the small town of Shirley, Mass. I got into a brief discussion with my brother-in-law about the community paper there, the Shirley Town Profile.

The paper was eight pages, max. A little weekly thing. I love small papers, because oftentimes I think they’re doing things better with what they’ve got than big and medium-sized papers do with their resources. I pulled a couple issues out of a basket near the fireplace and my brother-in-law started telling me about how he loves that paper because it actually has local news. I’ve seen the data. I’ve read countless articles about hyperlocal news. I’ve certainly preached it. But I have never actually heard someone outside the media industry qualify it.

The paper had just a couple of stories in it. Mostly it was about school fundings and how area schools were at a deficit. The opinions section was littered with hearty debate and finger pointing from parents and politicians. The main story was about where the money was going. It felt a lot like a blog. There seemed to be real community happening here.

I’m not entirely sure about the situation, but it seems like parents are given the right to send their kids to any school in Mass. Yet, the people in the school district foot the bill for each school, so there’s a disparity when kids shift to richer districts.

This is the perfect opportunity for database reporting. The Globe and other larger media outlets in the state should have this story nailed in such a way that gives not only an overall picture, but allows members of each of these communities to see how the system affects their lives. It should allow people to communicate with one another the way Town Profile does.

But they don’t. Every night and every morning the space was filled with blood and horror.

Was nice knowing you, but you blew it and when the Town Profile figures out blogs, and all the other little papers around you figure this stuff out, you’re dead in the water. I say good riddance to these media outlets that miss this.

Then, when I got home, back to Fargo, I ended up at a party at my Father-in-law’s house in the small town in the Fargo Moorhead metro area, Dilworth. There were lots of people there and in typical Midwestern fashion, while the women were in the dining room drinking coffee, the men were in the living room talking about things that annoy them.

The conversation started out talking about general sales taxes in the area, something all the media here covers extensively,  but then it got specific. They started talking about special assessments in Dilworth. Special assessments right down to how much the curbs in front of their homes will cost them over the next few years.

Meanwhile, the local TV news was on and nobody was paying attention to whatever bigger picture things (or not) were happening in the region.

The contrast was striking.

Every large issue is built of small components and we tend to leave out all those little details. But it’s those little details that are relevant to small pockets of readers. Add them up and you have a nice audience. You also give them some place to connect and talk about the things that matter to them which gives your news (which could end up buried or ignored) a longer shelf life and more valuable to advertisers.

Think small.