Last week's news

23rd May 2010

Link reblogged from Marco's stuff with 104 notes

Last week's news →

Most news outlets, including TV news shows and networks, newspapers, news websites, and blogs are targeted at news junkies: they never want to miss a story, and they want to be the first to report it to you.

If you look back on these stories even one week later, the majority of them seem…

Recently I read a post by Marco Arment, one of the cool developers of this even cooler Tumblerthing, about an idea he had but couldn’t implement because of shortness of time. The idea was a different kind of news site, although news site is the wrong term. His idea was to have a site that curates the news of a week, but in hindsight. So every Sunday morning there goes up a post with the most relevant stories of the week before, the ones that have proven to have impact. This would be a way to shift through all the noise that we are exposed to today and provide us with the news that really matter. With his own words: “I want last week’s news, but only what I need to know, and only if it has proven to have relevance beyond the day it was published.[…]Don’t give me any “breaking” information or up-to-the-minute stories. Mentioning any event that happened less than 7 days ago is strictly prohibited.” I absolutely love this idea, but there are a few things that I would do differently. Depending on the niche of the site, I would expand the timeframe to a whole month. In technology that would be far too long, obviously, but with politics or health or whatever a month would be the perfect timespan to really analyze and elaborate on the things that have happened.

I am also not sure yet about what format would be used for the reporting. Would it be simply links to well written articles on the subject or would it be a weekly/monthly essay summarizing and analyzing what happened, the links only as a reference? Would self conducted interviews be appropriate or would the site profit from a more distanced point of view?

I find all of this to be very fascinating and I am inclined to give it a shot, probably even as soon as in August (yeah, I plan that far ahead).

What is even more fascinating is that I also ran across this cool article about the future of journalism and the way of semantically marking up the content so it can be used multiple times without the manual hassle that would take right now. I need to reread the article actually, because there were so many cool thoughts in there that I haven’t absorbed them all yet.

If I ever get around the “news of last week” thing, I will definitely incorporate a lot of his suggestions into the site.

Source: marco

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