News has become a commodity – with basically the same stories everywhere. How to differentiate yourself? One way is to excel in adding context and relevance around the stories. Here are some tools to help you.
News stories on the web should never be left alone. Rather they should be put in the right context and be connected to relevant material from elsewhere on the site and on other sources.
For a news site this can be one way to differentiate itself from competitors.
Basically there are two ways to create context around news content:
- Manual editing by the journalist, for instance by adding links, listing relevant stories, etc.
- Tools offering context and relevance automatically.
Good journalism always involves adding context in the story. Yet with today’s sophisticated technology depending on manual work alone, as many news sites surprisingly still do, will not provide sufficient actuality and relevance for the loyal readers. Typically it will also make the article lists outdated very soon.
Fortunately there are many tools to help you. In this blog post I will list some of them. Hopefully I will add more later – and I would certainly appreciate suggestions from you.
Let me start with the tools I use on this blog.
Look at this word: Apture. Move your mouse over the small book symbol – and you will get an overlay window with more information about this word, in this case the Wikipedia article, messages from Twitter and a video explaining what the service is all about.
You can also hightlight any word on this page and you will get access to a similar overlay with relevant information.
If you scroll down on this page you will discover a tool bar showing up on the top of the screen with tools to share the page in social media and a search box. The search box will give you an overlay with relevant content, including stories about the same topic on this blog.
The main purpose of Apture is to present relevant information from the web without having the user leave you page.
I like the tool a lot – and it is also used by a number of major news organizations.
Here is an Apture-enabled page on The New York Times.
At the bottom of all posts on BetaTales you will find listings of all comments about this post on Twitter and a number of other social media sites.
These comments are provided automatically by Backtype.
The service calls itself a real-time, conversational search engine. It continuously scans the web for comments relating to specific URLs. By implementing their tools you can have all Twitter comments related to the article automatically included after the text.
In my opinion this puts the article in a live social media context. This adds significant value to the reader, who can get an overview of the buzz created by the content he/she is studying. And as for Apture, you don’t need to leave the page to study the comments.
There are other services doing much of the same. One of them is Echos.
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
This is a plugin for WordPress returning relevant articles within your own site. You find this at the bottom of this articled – named “Related posts”. Basically the plugin gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site.
There are a number of different tools and plugins doing the same. I have found this one to be very reliable. In most cases it will supply articles that are very relevant to the current post.
This tool set was previously known as Sphere and is used by several big media companies such as Newsweek, Reuters, Time and Washington Post. It will both bring in relevant content from your own blog as well as from other sources around the web. Currently their new plugin S4 is in private beta. I just received an invitation code – and their widget has now been installed below this blog post along with others.
For me Zemanta is a very useful tool when I write blog articles. As I write, it suggests relevant articles to link to. It also makes it very easy to include links to expressions and names I use in the article, like Zemanta. At the bottom of this article you will find some of the articles Zemanta recommended to me as I was writing this blog post.
Recommendation engines
Read the Monday Note article “Recommendation Engines: A Must for News Sites” for a good introduction to this topic.
Semantic web
Media sites should pay close attention to the developments in the semantic web. Rather than just identifying key words and expressions, the semantic web concentrates on indentifying the meaning of content.
One interesting project is the Open Calais, sponsored by Reuters Thomson. Open Calais describes itself as “a rapidly growing toolkit of capabilities that allow you to readily incorporate state-of-the-art semantic functionality within your blog, content management system, website or application.”
- 10 reasons why news organizations should use “linked data” (MediaShift)
- Top 10 semantic web products of 2009 (ReadWriteWeb)
Related articles by Zemanta
- Blogging is fun again with Zemanta and Apture! (72suited.com)
- Content that works: Contextual content, in context (RexBlog.com)
Do you have suggestions for great tools to add context to web content? Let us know in the comments field below.
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