An almost new way of organizing news

The way a news organization arranges its content -- news, business, sports, editorial, etc. -- has been a standardized and unquestioned mantra of journalism for many decades.

The front page, or in the digital age the "home page," had a mix of stories and subjects, but each section such as sports had stories that could specifically classified as belonging to that section.

But is this how the readers really want their news?

What if there's a topic you're especially interested in and you want everything a news organization has on that topic in one place? And, if it's breaking news, you want those stories updated the moment new information comes in. And you don't want to wade through a lot of other stuff.

That kind of organization -- one by news topic rather than section heading -- may be on the way. GoogleLabs has teamed up with the Washington Post and New York Times to experiment with something they call Living Story Pages. These pages take a topic and group everything the news organization has about that topic together.

You can see the results of the experiment at this GoogleLabs page.

The Post has three pages, one each on health-care reform, D.C. schools and the Washington Redskins. The Times has five: Afghanistan, executive compensation, global warming, swine flu and health care. These are topics the news organizations are paying a lot of attention to and to which they are continually generating new information.

This is a departure from the standardized news site organization, but it isn't totally new. Newspapers did this years ago when they would group all of their stories about a big news event together on a page or in a special section.

The news here, however, isn't the idea so much as that fact that the news organizations are working with Google -- not going to war with the search engine behemoth as Rupert Murdoch apparently is determined to do.

And there is yet another departure from the traditional thinking: the Living Story Page mixes news and opinion together. That's a bigger break from the past than most people realize.

Stepping on the Big Feet of Washington journalism

David Sirota, writing for Salon.com, steps on a couple of the Big Feet of Washington journalism for supporting the Idiocracy:

First came a now-famous column about Afghanistan by the Washington Post's David Broder. The "dean" of the press corps attacked President Obama not for choosing any particular policy, but for simply taking time to meticulously consider his options in the Central Asian quagmire. "The urgent necessity," Broder asserted, "is to make a decision -- whether or not it is right."

This was followed by Jackson Diehl, the Post's foreign policy "expert." He wrote that the White House’s assiduous Afghanistan deliberations are not a sign of reassuring prudence after the bring-it-on Bush years, but instead a "compelling cause for unease about this president." Diehl's rationale for such an incendiary statement? He alleged (without proof, of course) that "there is unanimity in the Pentagon and considerable agreement in Congress and among the NATO allies" that a military escalation has to happen -- and therefore Obama "knows (the pro-escalation) course he must take" but "can't bring himself to embrace it."

Good points. Worth reading the whole thing.

A good take on being a reporter

Reporting is where journalism begins.

Without reporting -- gather facts, information, and views and putting all those together -- journalism doesn't exist. So we owe a deep debt to those who spend their lives doing the tough job of reporting.

Deborah Howell, ombudsman for the Washington Post, has a good take on what it takes to be a reporter in her current column.

What makes a good reporter? Endless curiosity and a deep need to know what is happening. Then, the ability to hear a small clue and follow it. When Post reporter Dana Priest first heard "a tiny, tiny piece" of what turned out to be the Walter Reed Army Medical Center scandal, she couldn't ignore it.

She also quotes former Post editor Ben Bradlee, not a bad reporter himself:

They've got to love what they're doing; they've got to be serious about turning over rocks, opening doors. The story drives you. It's part of your soul.

Read the whole thing.