
The future of news is not an article - pmcpinto
http://nytlabs.com/blog/2015/10/20/particles/
======
Alex3917
I created a (non-technical) prototype of basically this exact idea a few years
ago to get a better understanding of the economics. It's online if anyone
wants to play with it:

[http://www.alexkrupp.com/Citevault.html](http://www.alexkrupp.com/Citevault.html)

Basically the economics are insanely good if you're using this as an open
source tool to create NYT-style articles, less so if you're Circa.

The people comparing this to the semantic web don't understand Zipf's Law, and
just how slowly things actually change. E.g. we only get new data on adult
literacy every 10 years. And the last data we have on antibiotic resistance
for some bacteria/drugs is from the early 90s, and that's more the rule than
the exception. Pretty much every single article about the U.S. is using the
same set of a couple thousand facts, and most of those only get updated every
ten years or so. There are a few exceptions like with federal arrest data that
gets updated yearly, but that's pretty rare.

Basically if you're trying to do this using machine learning or any sort of
algorithms, you're completely wasting your time and going down the wrong path.
This is way easier to implement well than you think. (But again, not
necessarily super profitable unless you own the NYT.)

~~~
sparkzilla
I ran a wiki-based fact check for a while. This looks like it could be the
start of something like that. However, a big problem is that the attempt to
find truth is over-rated as a driver for the news market. Most people really
don't care, and by the time the few that do care have found "the truth" the
news cycle has passed.

------
zmitri
The future of news is not an article, nor video, nor particles, nor
arbitraging the cost of a page view from advertisers vs the cost of paid
distribution on Facebook (yes NYT does this) — it is finding a business model
that actually works and that people want to pay for.

Let's go over some of the points brought up with that in mind:

Would you as a reader pay for more for a service that had "enhanced tools for
journalists"? No.

Would you as a reader pay more for "summarization and synthesis"? Probably
not, Wikipedia and Google already do this really well.

Would you as a reader pay more for "adaptive content"? No.

Newspapers (including the New York Times) are in serious trouble, and instead
of playing catch up to look like a mix of every tech service, they should
focus on delivering an experience that people actual want to pay for.

There is no future of news without figuring out the next model for news.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I know what I would pay for:

\- More AMA (and not just with the famous people; I loved the "I'm a Joe
Random Starbucks employee, AMA" threads before AMAs went mainstream).

\- More ELI5.

\- Supporting HN and (parts of) Reddit so that every article is analyzed and
dissected by people in the know, who point out all the bullshit the news
station put in, and point towards relevant resources.

Oh, and at this point in my life I'm willing to pay quite a bit for a news
service that can prove to me they a) don't blatantly lie, and b) have some
minimum competence on-board to cover the topics they're writing about. An
information source that I could trust to incorporate to my daily decision-
making process is something worth paying money for.

~~~
davnicwil
> I'm willing to pay quite a bit for a news service that can prove to me they
> .. don't blatantly lie .. An information source that I could trust to
> incorporate to my daily decision-making process

Looking for such a single source will only ever result in frustration. Whether
a given news source is assembled by a huge corporation with political
affiliation, or a single intellectual who answers to nobody and has complete
artistic freedom, it's irrelevant - the source has its own incentives, biases
and ultimately, an agenda of some sort.

Even though it obviously happens in some instances, they don't even have to
'blatantly lie', just select and present facts in a way which supports their
narrative, and as such even if you could somehow cut out all sources that
simply lie, you'd still have a similar problem. How can you routinely trust a
single source for your decision-making when you know that source must have its
own independent agenda that may not always align with yours?

The answer is you have to do the hard work of reading several sources with
different agendas and incentives, getting different perspectives, and making
up your own mind about what's really going on with a particular issue based on
that. There's no way around it, no shortcut, in fact a source which would
charge to provide willing customers with such a shortcut is probably the type
of source more inclined to shape their stories to suit what the most well-
paying customers, or at least the section of the market they've cornered off,
want to hear.

~~~
shurane
Doesn't trust factor into this? I have friends that I would trust with asking
for fitness related information/suggestions. I may end up doing more research
on my own, but I trust those friends to leave out doing a lot of the work
myself, even if their agendas don't align with my own.

And when I don't have friends to ask about a particular subject, I might end
up going to an online community like HN or a subreddit to ask individuals or
groups of individuals those questions.

I tend to trust people who don't have a profit motive more than I do a big
company which has an incentive on pushing their product.

------
sparkzilla
We have been breaking the traditional news article apart at Newslines for over
a year now. The result is a hybrid between daily news, Wikipedia and Google
Search. We break each news story down into a 150-word summary unit based on
each news event which we then sort by date to make a timeline of the news. For
example, Tom Hanks[1].

Because the news summary is treated like data, we can sort it to show
different views of the data. for example, reversing the sort gives a
"biography view" [2]. Compare this to a Wikipedia page, or even a newspaper
article, which, because they text-based, cannot be sorted. By adding meta data
we an then filter the data. For example, we use "Event Types" such as births,
deaths, arrests, and many more to let the users take control over what they
want to see. For example you can see all the apologies on the site.[3]

A big advantage of this way of creating pages is that it results in far less
bias than in a traditional news article. If you're interested in more, I wrote
a follow up to the NYT article [4].

[1] [http://newslines.org/tom-hanks/](http://newslines.org/tom-hanks/) [2]
[http://newslines.org/tom-hanks/?order=ASC](http://newslines.org/tom-
hanks/?order=ASC) [3]
[http://newslines.org/event/life/apology/](http://newslines.org/event/life/apology/)
[4] [http://newslines.org/blog/the-article-is-dead-long-live-
the-...](http://newslines.org/blog/the-article-is-dead-long-live-the-feed/)

------
sdkmvx
> Can you imagine if, every time something new happened in Syria, Wikipedia
> published a new Syria page, and in order to understand the bigger picture,
> you had to manually sift through hundreds of pages with overlapping
> information?

That is exactly what Wikipedia does. It works well because most readers are
not looking in an encyclopedia for information on yesterday's events.

Likewise inverted pyramid works well because it simultaneously satisfies the
needs of new readers who need the most important details at the top and repeat
readers who can quickly scan the short paragraphs for new information. I
despise new-style live streaming because it is so awkward to read; I have to
read backwards, bottom-to-top, and the most important details are often in the
middle.

~~~
sparkzilla
One of the major problem with Wikipedia is that it acts like a book on the
web, rather than a database. It is impossible to search the content of
articles and meta data on the actual content is practically non-existent. This
means you can't sort or filter the pages. The live-streams you have read so
far are very messy -- as they should be due to the nature of breaking news --
but there are other hybrids that fit between Wikipedia and news that can work
well for most readers.

------
godzillabrennus
My takeaway from this article is amazement. Amazement that the New York Times
is trying something new. I applaud them for that.

The Tribune Company is about to sell its Michigan Ave building since its
bleeding cash. They established a venture fund a few years ago but last I
heard hadn't invested yet since they hadn't found anything worth an
investment.

In an industry full of failing companies it's delightful to see one Titan try
to stay relevant.

~~~
liamzebedee
Definitely. I agree completely. For someone relatively uninformed on the
scene, the NYT certainly seem like a leader in the news industry for going
forward with new digital media [1].

I really like the idea of Particles. I had a similar thought this past year
about building a news MVP that simply consisted of atomic facts (no more than
a sentence) with an attached probability and discussion. Kind of like those
you see in the IPCC (international panel on climate change) reports, where
they have their claim and degree of certainty.

We were getting there with the whole Wikidata initiative, but it's still in
its primitive stages with respect to content being statically authored and
updated (AFAIK). It would be very interesting to see where we go with GraphQL
- I could see that becoming the dominant machine-to-machine protocol for
Semantic Web 3.0. The whole idea of taking what are usually REST resources and
turning them into hierarchical JSON documents which you can query very
flexibly is immediately appealing.

If this Particle concept catches on like cards have in UI design, I'd expect
Twitter to be the first to ride the wave.

[1] [http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/05/the-leaked-new-york-
times-i...](http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/05/the-leaked-new-york-times-
innovation-report-is-one-of-the-key-documents-of-this-media-age/)

~~~
sparkzilla
Larry Sanger, Wikipedia's co-founder, already tried to make a site using
atomic facts. It was called Infobitt, and lasted about a year or so before he
closed it down a few months ago. The problem with using the fact as the
smallest data unit is that it invites fact checking, which slows down the news
reporting. Ironically, if sanger had actually used his system to create
Wikipedia pages, it would probably have had more success. Wikidata is not
going to work. It suffers from the same issue, as well as having problems
relying on Wikipedia's "facts".

As for Twitter, I doubt they can do it either. Their "Moments" initiative
shows how little they understand curation.

~~~
skybrian
Vox is doing a pretty good job of it. The NYT already has quite a large number
of topic pages on a variety of subjects [1], [2]. It's not Wikipedia, but it's
not a small number of articles either.

[1]
[http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/i...](http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/index.html)

[2]
[http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects...](http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/a/artificial_intelligence/index.html)

~~~
sparkzilla
I checked one of the feeds [1]. It's just a list of existing articles, by NYT
writers, that don't have meta data. That's not what the NYT article is about.
To make the meta tagging work you have to also strip down the article into
each individual news event. For example, imagine a list of NYT articles about
Yoko Ono. Almost every article about her will mention that she was married to
John Lennon, and that he died in 1980. In an article you have to repeat this
information because you assume that the physical paper was thrown out each
day. But in a news database these events would be separate data events, and
would not be repeated. Vox is the same - they still use articles, not data in
their place.

[1][http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g...](http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/tim_golden/index.html)

------
vonnik
Former NYT journalist here. I'm really glad the paper is experimenting like
this.

I want to make a slightly bolder statement than the headline of the post:

The future of news is not written, and it's not one way. It's conversational
and spoken.

We've been migrating away from the printed word at least since the advent of
radio, and TV only accelerated that trend.

What people want is the interaction and surprise and meaning created in a
conversation. Papers like the NYT aspire to "drive the conversation." But they
are not engaged in "the conversation" on an individual level. They are largely
confined to the one-to-many schema of the old news flow, where publications
speak and readers listen.

The future of news, imho, is chatbots personalized to the user, that bring up
the daily news like small talk on a long commute, based on the AI's knowledge
of the news consumer. And it'll have through a voice UX just as much as
through print.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Thanks for the interesting perspective. While I can see myself enjoying
chatterbots telling me news in a casual way, I still wonder - with such focus
on "surprise and meaning", where do facts enter the picture? Are we migrating
away from factual information towards personalized, opinionated content?

~~~
vonnik
I think we already migrated. Right now, each story is a bundle of facts and
statements. A chatbot could disaggregrate those facts, and feed the news
consumer answers to questions they have about the subject without imposing
such a total order to the presentation of those facts. That would be the give
and take, and the conversation could range far beyond a single piece of news.
It's all about contextualizing events. Reporters and editors make a lot of
decisions about the context they present, but in this new choose-your-own-
adventure format, readers could explore context beyond the limits imposed by a
small newshole and all the decisions that entails.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I wonder how this will change the way news and society interact. Right now,
news serve as a very important social object - recent events and popular
articles provide default topics for conversation for people. If we move to
"choose-your-own-adventure format", we may lose the ability to discuss it, as
everyone will have their own version of "recent events".

BTW. the way you described it - choose-your-own-adventure, seamlessly
explorable news - sounds really cool. I'd definitely love to try something
like this out.

------
miguelrochefort
There is no reason for new information to be more important than old
information.

Sure, there's a subset of information that's ephemeral and must expire at some
point. The kind of information with a call to action. But that shouldn't be
the whole picture.

We need a new kind of information engines that both knows what you know, and
knows what you want to know. Something that both teach you old and timeless
facts, and keeps you up to date with new discoveries.

New shiny stories shouldn't distract me from what I planned to read yesterday.
We need a cure to novelty.

I like this New York Times initiative.

~~~
frenchy
> There is no reason for new information to be more important than old
> information.

New information is often more entertaining than old information, particularly
if the old information is already known to the reader.

For better or for worse, I think news is often used for entertainment.

------
vlehto
>3\. Adaptive content

The only reason I don't order morning paper these days is that it's physically
so big. I only read about 5% of it. If I forget about it, it's going to
explode my mailbox. And I would have to take the papers to garbage twice a
week to fend off chaos.

Could I please subscribe only to politics, science, actual news and opinions.
Curated by local major news outlet. It would be the best possible way to kill
the time needed to drink two cups of coffee.

I think people are overthinking this. By "what would average person want?".
Maybe they want what you want?

------
mjklin
Funny, I just read this in the book _The Logic of Failure_ by Dorner:

> The information a newspaper-reading citizen receives about economic
> developments or the spread of epidemics, for example, lacks both continuity
> and constant correctives. Information comes in isolated fragments. We can
> assume that those conditions make it considerably more difficult to develop
> an adequate picture of developments over time.

Maybe this is the answer?

------
contentwrangler
This thread illustrates the need for personalized services, aimed at
individuals who will pay for what they want. I mean, we have lived through the
'here's a package of content our psychic powers indicate you will want to buy'
(newspapers, record albums, cable TV packages). What people want differs,
which is why we need intelligent content. The capabilities (that's what upper
management cares about) add value to the organization adopting the new
approach and makes them capable (capacity + ability) to deliver better, more
people-focused (instead of persona-focused) content.

Agility is key. The world of big content will change everything as we begin to
ask questions of content and deliver adaptive content focused on individual
needs.

My two cents. My crystal ball is cracked, but seems to have been working fine
lately. ;)

Scott Abel TheContentWrangler

------
Jgrubb
I'm the lead dev at a company that ten years ago was a B2B publishing company.
We published trade magazines for a variety of technical and R&D type fields.

We're now in online publishing (obviously) and just finished tagging several
hundred thousand pieces of content with metadata that we'd used a 3rd party
service to extract. We'd reached the exact same conclusions about the process
of organizing and categorizing our ginormous back catalog of content, and
having humans perform the tasks of summarization and categorization just
"doesn't scale" temporally. Interesting topics come and go, editors come and
go.

Anyway, I'm really proud that we already have (in production) a system for
tagging our content in this exact same way and have already built a v0
recommendation engine out of it.

------
ftwynn
I think a lot of these ideas in here are awesome... but I don't see how
they're different from the basic semantic web concepts that have been tossed
around for years now.

~~~
miguelrochefort
Novelty man. People will always go after the new and shiny things, even if
they're just redefinitions of old ideas.

I've been spreading the merits of the semantic web for years. People just
ignore it. I've never been able to tell whether the idea is flawed, or if
people simply don't get it.

I regularly go as far as to claim that the lack of semantic web is the cause
of all the world's problems.

~~~
marcosdumay
The idea is flawed.

Semantic Web expects people to do extra work, with no benefit. Create a
benefit for those people, and you'll see it get done.

~~~
miguelrochefort
The benefit is the unifed interface.

Imagine Facebook being replaced by the semantic web.

~~~
marcosdumay
For the people creating content, that's a problem, not a benefit.

Yes, for the readers, if there were enough structured content available, that
would be a benefit. They aren't the ones that need convincing.

------
esfandia
Could this be done using Twitter? Each reporter/citizen who has an update on a
news item would post a tweet with the info, and create a link back to the
original news item(s) or the one(s) that needed updating. Hashtags would be
used to categorize the news item. You get an annotated DAG.

User can then filter based on the reporter they want to follow on that news
item, the hashtag that is interesting to them, or on the timeline of the news
item they're following.

------
li-ch
Not only news. Articles' future is not articles.

------
KasianFranks
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------
KasianFranks
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In order to leverage the knowledge that is inside every article published, we
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formats are still conceived of as dispatches: items that get published once
and don 't evolve or accumulate knowledge over time...

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