In my client experience with major news companies, there is often resistance to moving away from the holy tablets of section-based taxonomy. And it’s been an editorial team-led resistance, or sometimes an argument for remaining attentive to user needs. Both hold merit, but as you say, the technology and need to compete are driving us to push the model in bolder directions.

It is happening, although some such projects haven’t seen the light of day yet. I think the kicker, from my own experience, is that advertising and biz strategy is driving a lot of the web editorial innovation coming down the road.

I’ve seen sophisticated ad strategies enthrone new models of organizing content at other media and entertainment companies. (Much of this follows topical aggregations, executed to varying levels of technical and revenue-driving ingenuity.) News orgs will not be immune.

I wish I could be less oblique, but as it goes, the most interesting work being undertaken by ad/design agencies in digital today is swathed in non-disclosure agreements. What I can say is that strategic reboots of taxonomy have become a distinctive pillar of intellectual property at big content organizations. In that respect, there’s a lot to come.

Cheers,
Jeff

Maybe get rid of individual section editors in lieu a “taxonomy” or “sectioning” editor who makes sure all the content is tagged appropriately and divides up the news budget for both print and online posting? And also, revise the news budgeting systems so that you don’t have to plan for and slot the content according to the physical sections in print, but according to topics or some other platform-independent way. Just seeing that piece of paper in the news meeting change could be a powerful tool for revising how editors think and place content in context.

Great thoughts. I think it’s critical that newspapers find a way to be the best place to learn about the news, rather than search engines.

You make a useful point that the topical sections of traditional papers are probably not really optimized for what’s needed online and how users think about finding content. It’s always interesting how historical habits transparently become implicitly entrenched over time.

I’d like to comment on this line from your post:

“We can find the content we want by searching for it, rather than pulling out a section of pages.”

I suspect you didn’t mean only external search, but also internal search engines. But the challenge is that users don’t use internal search engines enough; far, far less than external search engines (mainly G.)

Putting newspapers in a historical perspective, they really were both places to learn about what news is important and places to read the actual articles. They were content producers and content aggregators.

But online, they are increasingly the last step in a transaction for content; about 50% of users come from google search or google news to typical news sites and they read 1, _maybe_ 2 articles on the news site before leaving.

This is bad, and hard to monetize.

So thinking about ways to be the best place to learn about news content is really, really critical. Maybe that’s better on-site search, better topics, external links, discovery tools, personalization, whatever. It’s more than changing sections or tag-clouds. Article pages need a complete make-over. But it’s critical to solve this problem in order to maintain audience or brand equity long term.

But I would still recommend reading up on taxonomy vs. folksonomy, for instance here: http://tr.im/mOKV

The real problem is how to present it, how to allow seamless navigation, and how to make groups of similar content meaningful.

I think developing the proper UI will play a big part on how well we succeed in moving away from these few arbitrary terms.