Tech & Biz

Why Not Writing a Story Is Innovation

by mtippett | December 11, 2008 at 03:27 pm

144 views | 9 Recommendations | 4 comments

Some good advice for the news business.

Newsrooms have to rethink the kind of stories they cover and the way they tell those stories, or all the new technologies could be wasted on news that readers don’t find relevant or interesting.

To do this, they have to practice innovation-by-omission. That is, they need to stop writing stories that don’t deserve to be written.

Newsrooms no longer have the luxury of wasting resources on non-stories — on “the journalism of filling space and time,” as Jeff Jarvis put it. They no longer have the luxury, in an information-overload world, of wasting readers’ time with non-stories or information readers already know. Readers will simply go somewhere else.

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Uwe Paschen

at 16:21 on December 11th, 2008

Some times it is difficult to know though as some stories unfold them self only latter and I think readers are still going by word of mouth and will look for a good writer or one that appeals to them and will read his or her post.

The writers stile matters as much as the subjects and the audience do.

Alida Antonia Cornelius

at 16:58 on December 11th, 2008

I guess it all depends if you want to be a good source of pertinent news, or you want to be a gossip monger like "The National Enquirer."

Personally, I don't read "The National Enquirer" or even "USA Today" for that matter.

You have to target your market segments.

mofiac

at 17:07 on December 11th, 2008

I think that writers need to always look at the story and how it should be told as opposed to whether or not it should be told. All stories are worthy of writers, not all writers are worthy of stories.

Ravi Dixit

at 20:42 on December 11th, 2008

This cannot be further than the truth, If consumers would exactly know what exactly they desire and have found it already we would just have one brand in every product category, true for news also!! We would end up having a One Newspaper or One TV Channel World (Bit exaggerated) so for the sake of plurality and diversity of views and information in the public domain individuals should be free to write whatever they feel is correct, if it is liked or not is not of much consequence. Info consumers of NOW cannot have a veto over the requirements of NEWS consumers of tomorrow. Galelio, Nicolaus Copernicus in their era I am sure there were not enough people wishing to read or understand their thoughts and if we apply these NEWS yardsticks their thoughts would not even get reported, but they are important and it might take a few centuries to fully understand a THOUGHT!!

Especially in the internet era of the power of the long tail, I do not agree with the thought

"Why Not Writing a Story Is Innovation"Sorry!!