Newsroom With A View

(Originally posted May 13, 2010)

I’ve heard more than once news people questioning why news sites (many, not all) put their newest stories at the top of the list of headlines as new things are posted through the day. A post at Lost Remote sums it up:

“This is hard for traditional news sites to grasp – we’re used to the finished news product and deciding which story to tell the audience is the lead – but continuous news is how people consume information online. It also doesn’t hurt that the format plays very nicely with Google. I’ve seen what happens at stations that switch to this web-native format, and the results are astounding: instant jumps in pageviews and time spent on site, and by several multiples as well.”

That post also cites a longer explanation posted on the pomoblog. A key point:

“The paradigm of ranked presentation is what the newspaper industry dragged with it to the Web in the mid ’90s, which was then copied by the television industry, because, well, that’s the way media companies did it. … Meanwhile, the people who built the Web moved in an entirely different direction, in part, because they knew something media companies didn’t — that the Web is a real time database, not a transport system for content.”