When (and where) a news article isn’t enough
The title is misleading: an article is never enough. There are plenty of fun and useful things to be done with information now that we’ve got the internet, and displaying a bunch of paragraphs and maybe a photo or two is quite meager.
There’s been some talk on the web about the failings of the article as the main way newspaper-dot-coms deliver information. There’s been some good talk about all the other things you can do with information than put it in a big blob of text.
Here are a few common instances where articles aren’t enough.
- Reviews. Music, restaurant, book, video game. Put ‘em in a database, don’t let that information go down the article-hole.
- Any type of Q&A-style column.
- Letters to the editor.
- The sports agate / stats.
- Profiles.
- Calendar listings (are newspaper-dot-coms still doing this? Yes, yes they are).
- Any type of story that runs in print on a regular or semi-regular basis.
If you’re interested in more reading on what more you can do with the information in articles, check out my “Structured Data” link-library on furl.net.
March 31st, 2008 at 6:05 pm
[…] that can be added to news article pages before. That’s all well and good, but there are distinct problems with the article as a means of presenting information too (I have posts tangential to this topic in the Step Away From The Article […]