- Hamilton Boardman
- Tiff Fehr
- Tyler Fisher
Breaking news formats have evolved and so have reader devices and preferences. Both The New York Times and The Guardian — through its Mobile Innovation Lab — have broadened their breaking news formats and experimented with new forms. In this session, we’ll review our current story forms and discuss the pros and cons, then share lessons from early experiments from the future of live coverage.
Agenda: Tour the classics, newer forms. Discuss the future. Intra-panel questions. Audience questions.
Goals: Shared vocabulary. Learn spectrum of pros/cons per forms. Dispel myths. Ground new ideas with next steps.
Realities:
- Shifting to mobile (except business junkies)
- Rich native app UX expectations
- Skimming, tl;dr
Myths:
- Folks are news junkies (newsroom folks are, but others aren't) "News is one of many" of the alerts on their screen. Also sub-topics in news like sports, entertainment, etc.
- Drop-by traffic converts into long-term readers
- Do we support late-comers? (We often lose the summary)
Hamilton Boardman (HB): Survey found large number of latecomers would go to Wikipedia to get caught up
Articles and liveblogs
Articles are time-tested, but time-consuming. Familiar to readers and comprehensive. But tl;dr, have they already read this (or this update?) "mentally diffing". For reporters, well-known, cohesive but takes the time to write it and there are expectations about effort.
Liveblogs are recent trend but attention-demanding. Learned expectations, up-to-date and feels urgent for readers, but hard to orient, oversaturation and things get buried quickly. For reporters, it's fast-paced and you can have varied depth, but you need to "feed the beast" and cohesiveness is hard.
- Briefings
- Chats
- Chatbots
- Notifications
- Augmented
- 'Smarticles'
- Mobile-focused experiences
Reverse-chron vs. forward-chron (chat).
Pros: expert analysis and debate, cons: transcript of cable-news talking heads
For readers: very up-to-date, second-screen experience, asked to join (sort of). Cons, tl;dr
For reporters: brevity, second-screen banter, slack comfort (perhaps). But they need to feed the beast. Editing questions. Threading comments and having a "host" is tough.
Politico's slack -> Live chat thing is open source. Can transform slack data into anything.
Removes sense of urgency from live-blog (feed-the-beast notion). "What's important right now"? Kind of like an article, but updated a lot. Ordered by importance rather than recency, but unlike an article it doesn't need to be a narrative.
Good: Daily digest and big moments. Bad: can turn into a live blog.
Doesn't demand consistent attention and helps readers catch up, but can be an ambiguously ordered collection of stuff.
Writing is brief, but things still get buried and editors can struggle with it.
Data driven events: Sports, voting, awards shows
Transcipt and annotations
Every annotation is in context. Transcription becomes a resource. But long events make for long transcripts, hard to keep track of new info.
For tech side, it breaks down into components well and the data already exists. But getting structure from the google doc is hard and transcripts are messy
Re-think of what notifications should do. Instead of driving people to coverage, it is coverage.
More engagement sometimes.
But repeated alerts can be irritating. Can be cold and distance. Currently are low-fi, but improving.
Expand on player limitations, notifications per timestamp, audience on platform.
Expand on format limitations, notifications based on place in story, audience on platform. Sending incremental changes.
Tyler Fisher (TyF): Live briefings writing style?
HB: There's no tool. Might be helpful to have one. Often a bottleneck on the editor. "If you've got anthing, send it to us!"
Me: Long-running but variations in urgency (like ferguson)
HB: Daily briefings, good for daily but not catchup. People will still go to wikipedia
Audience: Can and should be doing?
Tiff Fehr (TiF): Think about audience, don't presume everyone wants to know.
HB: Some apps let you dial up or down number of notifications. Let people set those preference easily.
TiF: Be good stewards with people's expectations and attention.
TyF: What about users who don't want to be a part of breaking news?
Audience: Timing on notifications, browser notifications
HB: Try to be aware of time of day as far as after 10 p.m. or before 6 a.m.
TiF: Target different readerships; coasts, international. Browser notifications might be useful page-specific vs. site-specific. Very easy to opt-out and tied with privacy/security so it's hard to ask people to change it.
Hamilton Boardman (@nytham) is a senior editor at The New York Times, currently serving as deputy Washington editor for digital. He has worked for nearly a decade on The Times's news desk as an editor on the digital home page and print front page and as a coordinator of live and breaking news coverage.
Alastair is a developer at the Guardian Mobile Innovation Lab, where he experiments in new forms of news coverage on both the web and in native apps. @_alastair
Tiff Fehr (@tiffehr) is an assistant editor on the Interactive Desk of The New York Times. She leads development on The Times' live coverage toolset and explores new ideas in breaking news storyforms with newsroom collaborators.
Tyler is a news applications developer at POLITICO on its new interactives team. He previously worked as a news applications developer on the NPR Visuals Team and as an undergraduate fellow at the Northwestern University Knight Lab.
Description and speakers from official schedule