An example of low-tech structured journalism dating back to 2005.

[Ben Garside]

B2B freemium site Defense Industry Daily seems to have been pursuing a structured approach to news since about 2005.
It rarely seems to publish a new article, but updates an existing one with smartly aggregated content.

This seems to work well if able to break down your content into discrete categories, but it is quite an inspiring example to my efforts of trying to add structure and value without much technical capability.

Ben

[David Caswell]

Thanks Ben - this is really interesting. 

In addition to being an example of what is possible with nothing more than a change in perspective I think this is also a good example of the fit between a specific 'kind of story' and a structured approach. Like Homicide Watch and, I believe, like state/local government activity, these are persistent stories that are of low interest to most people most of the time, but of extremely high interest to some people some of the time.

I think that the metrics by which the success of structured journalism is judged perhaps need to accommodate that - maybe new metrics such as 'lifetime engagement' or 'cohort repeat engagement' or similar are more appropriate for stories that persist as structure. Chris Amico has written a little on this as it applies to Homicide Watch, which is apparently still getting significant page views long after fresh reporting stopped. 

[Ben Garside]

We are considering doing something similar for our startup B2B paywalled news site, though our categories are not as discrete as DID so we will still be publishing a lot of standard news articles.
It would rather add an extra value proposition, and, beyond the initial set up, would be relatively time-neutral to maintain, as any additional work for journalists to update would be offset by work saved trawling through old articles and searching for additional material.

Ben

[Joshua Romero]

Ben, 

Thanks for sharing. What B2B site are you working on? I'd love to hear more about the approaches you're considering. I've also been looking at ways to embed more structure in B2B beat reporting.

-Josh

[Ben Garside]

I will do Josh, we're a few weeks away from full launch.
But its not exactly anything that would raise any eyebrows compared to the stuff that gets discussed in this group.

Its a 3-journalist B2B niche startup that is adopting some simple structured journalism principles that we could produce at no-net extra work than ordinary news articles.

1) A dynamic glossary - direct links for easy reference to concise explanations of frequently used jargon without distracting those who are familiar with them in our main content.
2) Topic dossiers constantly updated from our newsfeed (which are in turn fed with background from the dossiers)
3) A calendar tool, where entries look a bit more like articles.

The idea being that with these, articles we do produce can either be produced more quickly, or start to look different - just a couple of lines with links etc like Bloomberg First Word's bullet-point approach.


Ben.