1. Twitter: Add a tweet button to your story and create content that people want to share with their friends.
2. Facebook: Add a “like” button to your post and create content that people want to share with their friends.
3. Search: Make sure your stories include words that people might use when searching for the information that you’ve provided, and create content to which people want to link.
4. Text (messaging): Create content that people want to share with their friends.
5. Tablet: Create content that people want to share with their friends.
6. RSS: Make sure readers can easily subscribe to your RSS feed and create a stream of content to which people want to subscribe.
7. Time shifters: Add a “read later” button and create content that people will want to read later.

Oh, and make sure you know in which publications you want to appear, and don’t write to appear in other publications. In old school terms, don’t write for Playboy if you want to appear in the Washington Post.

People use the internet to get only the news they are looking for and nothing else, which presents a challenge for big media companies that have traditionally sold news and advertising in bundled formats (newspapers and broadcast news programs, for example).

But the internet did not kill bundled news, it just changed how those bundles are created. Where editors once selected the contents of news bundles, a modern information consumer use technologies that produce bundles based her choice of sources, topics of interest, interactions with that content, and recommendations from friends.

• RSS readers like Google Reader allow people to subscribe to only certain sites, or specific topics from a site.
• Personalized homepages like My Yahoo are bundles of customized informational widgets that display news in a more visual way than RSS feeds.
• Social networks like Twitter and Facebook constantly stream a bundle of news in the form of text, links, images and sounds shared by friends.
• Tablet apps like Flipboard bundle links being shared within a person’s social network into an interactive magazine.
• Web apps like Paper.li bundle links from social networks in a similar fashion to what Flipboard does for the iPad.
• Mobile apps like My6Sense bundle news based on how you’ve interacted with previous information.
• Human aggregators like Matt Drudge continue to bundle information in a unique way that appeals to a wide audience.
• Hybrid aggregators like memeorandum use human editors to help bundle content for niche audiences that has been selected by an algorithm that considers signals from the blogging ecosystem.

What next?

So how/do traditional organizations fit into these new bundles? Should they continue to provide bundled content on web sites? Should they continue to provide advertisers a way to reach the audience of that bundle? These aren’t rhetorical questions. They are real puzzles that have been discussed for years now. I’m still not sure if there are many clear answers.

Here are some important posts about the unbundling of news:

• Dissecting the Media: Trust and Transactions (Sep. 2004)
• The clickthrough’s tyrannical efficiency (Mar. 2006)
• Online newspapers should un-bundle content and bundle business (Mar. 2006)
• The Great Unbundling: Newspapers & the Net (Apr. 2008)
• Surrendering advertising … killing bundling (Jan. 2010)

Image courtesy of Liz West via Flickr.

Embedly is an incredible technology that converts links into embedded content. The screenshot above shows how Embedly’s Parrotfish plugin (for Safari, Chrome and Firefox) works with Twitter.com to convert a shortened URL into an actual excerpt from the content on that page.

Storify and other so-called curation tools (see my What is curation storify) use Embedly, so I’m very excited about this and any other embedding technology, but I wonder how publishers who rely on on-site display advertising feel about tools that basically allow people to view some or all of their content without actually visiting their site.

What should publishers do about embedded content? Here are some crazy ideas.

• Accept that people get content in new ways that don’t involve visits to your site.
• Thank Embedly for building attribution, with links, into its API.
• Understand how to leverage embedded content to build your brand(s).
• Embed advertisements directly into your content.
• Figure out other ways to generate revenue.

Take a look at any Paper.li paper — my J Daily for example — and imagine if that page changed based on how you interacted with each item.

• Stories written by a certain author could rank higher if you frequently read her posts.
• Articles from a particular site could rank lower if you rarely clicked on those links.
• Links shared by some friends could rank higher if you frequently clicked on them. They might be called “favorite” friends.
• Links shared by friends of favorite friends could rank higher because of their association.
• If you frequently retweeted links from specific friends, that friend’s links could rank higher.
• Maybe pictures (but not blog posts) shared by one friend could be ranked higher because you often click on them.
• The whole page could be ranked with consideration of my interactions with the My6Sense mobile app.

Note that I don’t actually know the details of My6Sense’s algorithm, so these are just my own crazy ideas.

After yesterday’s post on Paper.li newspapers about journalism, I decided to create this Facebook Journalism “newspaper.” Paper.li produces the daily page by searching public Facebook links that include the word “journalism.” What do you think?

1. J Daily, based on links shared by 332 people on a Twitter list created by me.
2. J List Daily, based on links shared by 43 people on a Twitter list created by Journalism.co.uk.
3. Journalists to Follow Daily, based on links shared by 35 people on a Twitter list created by the Society of Professional Journalists.
4. Linkers Daily, based on links shared by 114 people on a Twitter list created by New York Times editor Patrick LaForge.
5. Media Daily, based on links shared by 92 people on a Twitter list created by Mashable’s Pete Cashmore.
6. Media Analysis Daily, based on links shared by 47 people on a Twitter list created by The Huffington Post’s Craig Kanalley.
7. Media Thinkers Daily, based on links shared by 58 people on a Twitter list created by journalism educator Mindy McAdams.
8. Mediawonks Daily, based on links shared by 199 people on a Twitter list created by CUNY journalism professor Jeff Jarvis.
9. Top Journalism Linkers Daily, based on links shared by 16 people on a Twitter list also created by Jay Rosen.
10. Young Guns of Journalism Daily, based on links shared by 88 people on a Twitter list created by Spot.Us creator David Cohn.
11. Young Smart Newsies Daily, based on links shared by 68 people on a Twitter list created by NYE journalism professor Jay Rosen.

If you know of other useful Paper.li publications related to journalism or the news industry, please add (and link to) them in the comments below.

1. 
   ksablan Question for @ckanal @jeffjarvis @mediatwit @mediagazer @cressman @mathewi: What’s your top source for journalism news? 08 Jul 2010 from UberTwitter
2. 
   Megan @ksablan @AlexMurashko Mediagazer publishes our source leaderboard: http://mediagazer.com/lb 08 Jul 2010 from TweetDeck
3. 
   ckanal @ksablan That’s a tough one. I have this list & check them all frequently @ckanal/media-analysis. Really like @rww & @mashable. 09 Jul 2010 from web in reply to ksablan
4. 
   mediatwit @ksablan No top source for j-news. Romenesko, MediaShift, Nieman Lab, Mediabistro, Poynter, ReadWriteWeb all good. 09 Jul 2010 from web
5. 
   mediatwit @ksablan Also: Howard Kurtz, IWantMedia, Mediagazer, BuzzMachine, On the Media, NewTeeVee and others. 09 Jul 2010 from web in reply to ksablan
6. 
   mathewi @ksablan: increasingly, I get my media news from @mediagazer — but also my list of media sources on Twitter 09 Jul 2010 from Twitter for iPhone in reply to ksablan
7. 
   cressman Weirdly,it’s becoming Twitter. RT @ksablan: What’s your top source for journalism news? 09 Jul 2010 from Echofon

— this quote was brought to you by quoteurl

Somehow, I made it into Rosen’s list, so here is where I get most of my information about journalism:

• My “J” Twitter List: I suggest following each person, not just the list. That way, tweets from each person on the list will show up in your main Twitter stream.
• Google Reader: Feel free to download  my list of subscriptions. Google has instructions to import that list into Google Reader. Watch out, it’s gigantic. Focus on the Journalism folder/tag.
• My Delicious network: In particular, I pay attention to pages that members of my network have tagged as ‘journalism’.
• My Meehive: I get a daily email of top stories from here.

Share your sources

Where do you get news about news and journalism? Please share in the comments below and help other readers and me to stay current with the changing world of journalism.

This service is very similar to Twitter Times, which I looked at last year.

Trends

You don’t have to be the owner of a Twitter account to create a newspaper, so I decided to make a paper for @tweetmeme, which tracks popular links on Twitter. Here is what Paper.li deduced from links shared by Tweetmeme and the 5,512 users it follows.

You might want to check out newspapers from these other Twitter trend trackers: Twitscoop Trends, Trending Topics and Twitturly.

Journalism

Contrast trendy papers to a newspaper culled from the links shared by CUNY journalism professor Jeff Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) and the people he follows.

Here are daily newspapers from other forward-thinking news people: Clay Shirky (NYU), Mathew Ingram (GigaOM) and Patrick LaForge (New York Times).

Wants

Here are some features I would love to see in the next version of Paper.li:

• Ranking: Stories/posts should be ordered according to the number of my friends who are sharing each link.
• Lists: Create sections of my paper based on the Twitter lists that I’ve created.
• Clicks: Watch what I click on. If you see that I frequently click on links shared by a certain user, give that person’s links more weight in the rankings. Maybe create a scoring system.
• Strike: Let me remove items that don’t interest me. When I remove an item, decrease the score of my friends who shared that link.
• Edit: I want to modify some of those funky headlines.
• Timeliness: Since Paper.li is billed as a daily newspaper, you can file this under unreasonable. Still, I would love to see a service that looks at my current stream and presents it in a similar fashion to Paper.li and Twitter Times.

A single news item is only important to a reader if it makes sense within a larger context. An example An example that journalist Matt Thompson offers up is the torrent of news items about health-care reform. Each item only makes sense if you understand the bigger picture. CUNY Professer Jay Rosen hails an NPR piece that explained the “mortgage mess” to him, providing background information necessary to fully appreciate new news about the mortgage industry.

If you’ve been following the ongoing conversation about context in some journalism circles, there’s a good chance you weren’t compelled to view the example hidden above. For you, that context was superflous because of your personal knowledge and understanding of the topic.

If, on the other hand, this is the first time you’ve heard the idea that news items need context to be useful to readers, a summary of related posts might be helpful. The conversation The conversation about context may have started four years ago when Nico Flores opined that content is meaningful only as “part of a wider conversation.” Author Jeff Jarvis ran with the idea, declaring that “content does not exist without context.” In 2008, Matt Thompson launched Newsless.org, hoping to advance the conversation about how to “fix” context, which he describes as journalism’s ailment. In 2009, Dave Winer argued that “streams” of news need structure, using Twitter’s lack context as an example. What followed were many tweets and more blog posts, all leading up to a “Future of Context” panel that was part of the South by Southwest conference earlier this month.

Every person who reads a news item, brings a unique set of life experiences and knowledge to put the news into some bigger story. Each reader also has a unique set of questions based on their ignorance of, and interest in, particular parts of that story.

One way to provide only the desired parts of a story for individual readers, might be to hide story elements until the reader clicks on a link to expand that part of the story. This is an old trick (shoddily implementod in this post) that might find new usefulness in this new context of … context.

I hoped to submit this post to Matt Thompson’s The Future of Context site, but technical requirements forced me to publish it here instead. Please follow the conversation about context happening on that blog to find out how journalists can create and deliver news in ways that can be more relevant and useful to readers than existing forms of storytelling.