Story-streaming

I’m look­ing back at an older Almighty Link post with new eyes today. In the post, Kevin Sablan from the Orange County Register imag­ines a story-streaming plat­form, sim­i­lar to what some peo­ple do with lifestream­ing. “Thinking of each story as an indi­vid­ual ‘life’ helps iden­tify the oppor­tu­nity for devel­op­ers to cre­ate or mod­ify a plat­form that can meet the needs of news organization.”

Sablan says a story-streaming plat­form should have three key char­ac­ter­is­tics. It should be story-centric, of course, includ­ing ele­ments that make for a good story, such as char­ac­ters and plot. It should pro­vide the oppor­tu­nity for real-time cura­tion (one of Sablan’s big inter­ests) and fil­ter­ing. And it should be inte­grated with what the news­pa­per already pro­duces, such as mak­ing a story-stream out of each item in the police blotter.

Granted, some smaller com­mu­ni­ties might not have enough infor­ma­tion cap­i­tal to put into a sys­tem like this — or the report­ing man­power to accom­plish it — but I think that when small addi­tions here or there are com­bined with the long tail, you can make some­thing rich online that read­ers will find value in.