News half-life

PhysicsWeb reports about a study done on how the number of people reading a news story decreases over time (via). The studies results are interesting, if fairly logical, results. Naturally, my mind went immediately into overdrive in thinking on how the results affect website design.
At least based on the PhysicsWeb article, the researcher have come to the conclusion that the average half-life of a news item is 36 hours. This

…implies that people could miss a significant fraction of news by not visiting the portal when a new document is first displayed, which is why publishers like to provide e-mail news alerts. The results also show that people read a particular web page not just because it looks interesting but because it can be accessed easily.

Of course this assumes that we\’re talking about a site with very requently updating news content and not a site with a fairly slow update cycle. Most sites with a fast cycle of publishing updated news are sites that deal specifically with news items, i.e. journalistic sites (be they professional or not), or sites that aggregate news from multiple sources (e.g. Newsvine or Ampparit).

In journalistic news sites, I\’d expect (and require) differentiating content that is deemed important enough to stay in the headlines to be highly visible on the front page and easily accessed even when looking back at the archives. For example, our local newspaper Karjalainen differentiates the online content of that days newspaper from the smaller daily newsitems that are updated during the day by separating the online only news into a sidebar. This approach works quite well, especially for someone like me who doesn\’t often read the dead-tree version.

A quick look at CNN and the New York Times didn\’t offer a clear distinction on how they differentiate highlighted news items from the smaller, constantly updated stream of news. In these cases I\’d think more IA is needed to highlight the content the journalists think is important. After all, that\’s what is done in the paper and broadcasts. At a professionally produced, journalistic site I am not interested so much on what other readers are interested in as what is important.

My lack of interest in knowing what newsitems others have liked comes from following the listings of the most popular news items in Ampparit (Ampparit is a Finnish site that aggregates news items from many different sites). Currently the most popular items are Angelina Jolie becoming a Kung-Fu instructor and Montoya leaving McLaren. Meanwhile, there are news items up on the memorials in Srebrenica, the situation in Somalia, and an accident in Bangladesh. While Ampparit is a great source of news and I follow it actively, my ability to catch noteworthy news items is very much dependent on how actively I visit the site, since items older than an hour or two drop quickly off the frontpage during the day. Here, the half-life of news items is brutally fast.

Newsvine is a fairly recent entry to the world of online news and reporting. It mixes news from professional (commercial) journalistic sources and news from citizen journalists, e.g. bloggers. What Newsvine enables is a way to follow how news is reported in various sources and how various sources have commented on the news. As such, it is a way to get an in-depth and multi-faceted picture of events. Of course, this all depends on the activities of the users and as such is vulnerable.

Whatever the half-life of news items is and however you decide to consum it, the internet is changing the way news is reported and consumed. A recent interview of media influencers in Finland by Helsingin Sanomat (as reported by Verkkouutiset) shows that even the leaders in media in Finland have finally realised that the Internet has an effect, in fact is changing, how people consume news. Now news publishers can’t rely on the fact that news will be consumed at predetermined times.

The ease of using multiple sources also means that publishers have to compete even more for their audiences. While some have voiced the concern that increased competition means less journalism and more tabloid-press, Helsingin Sanomat has chosen to compete by adding more background information and follow-up to their reporting. Which is exactly the kind of journalism that I want in addition to the reporting of breaking news.

As an active consumer of news from various sources, I can only be grateful of all the new tools that help me consume news – and not only the news that I’ve pre-determined an interest in. It’ll also be interesting to see how Newsvine affects news publishing. Unfortunately I’m not in a position to evaluate how Newsvine influences reporting, since Finnish news isn’t very actively reported or discussed there.