March 14, 2007
The Central Resource (how to make it)
A running theme of this symposium seems to be that there’s a need for supplemental content online - a central resource of sorts - that will keep readers coming back for more information. How might such a site be reasonably implemented?
It seems to me that there are two possibilities: each publication could create several sub-sites for consistently hot issues, or there could be some non-partisan (non-profit? Governmental? International?) site to which many different publications could link.
Several sites already have sub-sites dedicated to particular issues. The New York Times, for example, has a sub-site dedicated to climate change . Of course, it seems that the last time it was updated was in 2001. It seems a good idea to put all the related articles from a publications archives into one place, but there may be practical barriers to this.
A central issue is that it’s costly to produce supplemental content (as Vicki Valentine and others pointed out in yesterday’s web technology show-and-tell session).
One solution to this might be found in another idea that’s floated around today: the idea of responding to hot topics.
The second group suggested that their site might somehow respond to whichever stories were most-clicked on Yahoo! or Google news. They also suggested that the most-clicked topics on (or portions of) their site could change colors (which I think is an excellent idea).
Because of the high price (in money and time) of fancy supplemental material, it might be practical for sites (either within a publication or at a non-profit) to wait a minute before developing such content. That way, they could add bells and whistles selectively to those stories that actually generated interest. Or they could add fancy video side bars to stories they thought needed more attention.
The issue with non-partisan resource sites is: How could you get Science, Nature, the New York Times, the USA Today, Discover, National Geographic, and all the rest (sorry if I didn’t hit your publication) to link to the same page?
Who would they all trust to accurately portray all the information on the issue, when they all rely for their survival on being known as the Best Source themselves?
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