27/12/2010 The Molecules of News « (Re)Structuri…

(Re)Structuring Journalism
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Posted by: structureofnews | December 26, 2010

The Molecules of News

We’ve talked about the atomic unit of news before – what’s the basic building block of what we do. For many
journalists, it’s the story, because in many ways that’s what they produce each day, and what they offer to the
world as a finished product.

I’ve argued here that we need to get past that thinking, because the story – and certainly the daily story – as the
basic unit of news is less and less valuable in a world where readers come to it weeks and months later, and have
access to a wealth of archives. Politifact, for example, deconstructs the story and turns what are essentially data
fields into the building blocks of its pages. Jeff Jarvis has argued that the topic is the new basic unit, and he
makes some fair points there, although it’s harder to see how that works in practice.

The broader issue, at least to me, and beyond communications school semantics, is how we get value out of what
we do – both in monetary and public interest terms. Articles age rapidly and are increasingly unable to cover
their cost of production, at least in any scalable system. So rethinking what we do – getting beyond just filing a
story – is critical if we’re to create new journalism products that sustain us and society. Or that’s the core idea
behind structured journalism.

So a recent New York Times story that looks at it from the other side caught my eye. The gist is that smart
financial traders are building programs that vacuum up streams of information – news, comments, twitter feeds
and the like – then analyzing them to get a sense of what the market is saying (or feeling) and then automatically
trading on it. This sort of thing was bound to happen – in fact, it’s a bit of a mystery why it hasn’t happened
sooner.

Many of the robo-readers look beyond the numbers and try to analyze market sentiment, that
intuitive feeling investors have about the markets….

Vince Fioramonti, a portfolio manager at Alpha Equity Management, a $185 million equities fund in
Hartford, uses Thomson Reuters software to measure sentiment over weeks, rather than minutes or
hours, and pumps that information directly into his fund’s trading systems.

“It is an aggregate effect,” Mr. Fioramonti said. “These things give you the ability to assimilate more
information.”

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In other words, never mind the story – what these programs do is take atoms (stories) and mash them up into
molecules of ideas or sentiment. It’s the wisdom of crowds applied to information flows. If there are lots of
mentions of IBM on twitter feeds, something is probably happening at IBM. If lots of market reports are
mentioning upbeat sentiment, then the market is probably feeling bullish.

It’s another way of creating more value out of what we do each day – for example, out of those mindless,
instantly forgettable hourly market reports that wire service reporters churn out with distressing regularity. (I
know – I used to do it at Reuters.)

In this case, some of that value is being captured by news organizations – the story mentions what Bloomberg
and Thomson Reuters are doing – but a great deal of it is being done by other people. Good for them – they’ve
found additional value in the products we turn out, in the same way that a smart computer-assisted reporter finds
value and patterns in masses of public data and information.

But it also highlights how much value we as an industry aren’t capturing. There is value in creating not just the
atoms of news, but the molecules as well – in fact, probably more value.

Smart people are deploying ever more powerful technologies to parse and understand the words we write and
turning it into something more understandable and valuable in aggregate; and here we are, the people we write
those words, with the ability to write them in a more structured and easily aggregatable format to begin with, so
that our words will be more valuable and our readers lives easier – and we don’t.

Ánd so we cede ground to others or try to compete in an information technology arms race that only the very
well-heeled can win.

That’s not to say that we shouldn’t use smart – and cheap – technologies to help us report and create information
products. But we should get past the elemental things that we do and think more about what we can do with
them. And what money we’re leaving on the table.

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Posted in Future of News, News Technology | Tags: Automated trading, Future of News, News Technology

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1. [...] Journalism: The Molecules of News — We’ve talked about the atomic unit of news before – what’s
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By: The Molecules of News – We’ve talked about the atomic unit … ((Re)Structuring
Journalism) | BuyElectro.com on December 26, 2010
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2. [...] The Molecules of News « (Re)Structuring Journalism – [...]

By: Veille technologique du 17 décembre au 27 décembre on December 27, 2010

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3. [...] LER – The molecules of news: Smart people are deploying ever more powerful technologies to parse
and understand the words we [...]

By: As moléculas das notícias : Ponto Media on December 27, 2010

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Welcome
(Re)Structuring Journalism explores the evolution of information in a digital age and how we need to
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And it proposes one possible solution: Structured Journalism.

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Reg Chua has been a journalist for more than a quarter-century; he's currently Editor-in-Chief of the South China
Morning Post
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