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?

Google Maps released a new feature Thursday, My Maps. The service lets you draw lines and shapes over the Google maps, add markers, add whatever HTML you want to the marker bubbles and then you can spit out into a KML file. You can then dump the
KML data into Google Earth or another Google Map for your Web site, with a little knowledge of the Google Map API.

My Maps makes drawing on a map dead easy, and as soon as Google adds features to let you easily geo-code tabular data and then embed My Maps into your Web site, it will be the killer map app for Web journalists.

This got me thinking about a few things.

First, programmers that understand journalism, and journalists that understand programming are few and far between, which causes a problem for news outlets looking to expand their Web operations.

Second, I’ve said it before, programming takes time and it’s never a finished product, which causes a fundamental problem for those who work on tight deadlines.

Lastly, where does the value of information lie for news gatherers?

First things first: Journo-programming

Ask a programmer to make something by a certain time and they’ll tell you it can be done. Eternal optimists, most of them, they often don’t know how long something will take to build. Building to a quality standard journalists need might not be an option on a Friday afternoon whim for an 12 p.m. deadline Sunday.

That’s a fact of life behind a computer.

The developers I work with like to ask “why build something new, when it has already been done?” They “steal” code from each other frequently, but they make a point on a grander scale.

Page designers don’t change their styles every week and they certainly don’t create their own fonts. So why should programmers start from scratch with every product?

The Internet does two things well: It organizes and displays data and it creates efficiencies.

When creating something that will only be used once or a few times by the news, why build it all from scratch if you don’t need to?

Time wasters

Obviously building something new and populating it with data takes longer than populating something already created with data.

There are hundreds–thousands even–of Web products out there. Many of them can be leveraged, for free, to suit journalistic needs without having to build the product from the ground up.

Check out the Bakersfield site. Their map section isn’t built from coders manipulating the Google API. They’re leveraging sites like Zeemaps and Quikmaps to quickly create their maps. They even use YouTube for video on occasion.

They hand over the information they gather to these services and in turn, basically wrap their sites around the embed codes or iframes the services kick out.

Which brings us to:

The catch

Just what the crunk is the value of journalism? Is controlling the final product and copyright or the actual news gathering process more important?

I’m starting to lean more towards the latter. Data is usually freely available to anyone with the motivation (or gall) to ask for it.

Journalists basically just gather information, parse it and put it in a relevant context for their readers. That’s why we read newspapers. That’s why we watch the 6 p.m. news. We’re not particularly interested in the fact that you control the information you gather. We care about the context and relevance of said information.

Traditional media has this weird fascination with controlling the information it gathers. News gathering organizations rarely offer full-text RSS feeds for this reason. They want eyeballs on their sites; Withholding all the information from your feed reader gives them some semblance of control.

So handing over data to third parties drives news business people up the wall. They see it as giving their property away.

I’d argue that information is hardly the property of news media. Their value is the context and analysis of the information. Many YouTube videos are pointless. Clicking around the site, many Zeemaps don’t make much sense either. But that’s because you’re not seeing them in the context of their creation. They are created with the mindset that context will be divvied somewhere else.

Sure, there’s the greater catch that third party Web services often fall by the wayside, which can hurt the value of archived news behind pay walls. I don’t think its enough of a problem, though, considering the money saved from having developers work more on projects with higher returns on investment than news.

News has a terribly short shelf life to spend working on projects that peak in views in a day or two.