The 1619 Project had a primetime special on ABC last night. Great perspective-changing stuff. I think a lot more people watch ABC than watch Fox. #
23 Apr
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Scripting News Annex 
Posted by john m on April 23, 2007 at 7:56 am
I keep trying to figure how NPR can work so that after I’ve made my contribution I don’t have to listen to the pledge drive anymore.
Posted by Dave Winer on April 23, 2007 at 8:02 am
No kidding!
I’ve had the same thought many times.
Think of how much more money they’d raise if they cracked that nut.
Posted by dataguy on April 23, 2007 at 8:04 am
My first thought is that “Breaking News” and “Bush Impeachment” are redundant 🙂
I’ve been thinking along these lines, of subscribing to keywords, as a filter to RSS feeds that people I work with could use. They know nothing about RSS (which isn’t a problem) and are very busy. I wanted to be able to have them filter a news feed without much effort.
Part of the solution has to be having an ability to assign some rank level to the filters. What happens when an interesting news item about the Bay Area hits the wire at the same time as a big story about the NY Metro area? How much time is devoted to each?
Posted by Speed on April 23, 2007 at 8:06 am
Do you think that CNN, MSNBC et al would be surprised to learn what stories people are really interested in? And which ones nobody cares about?
Posted by Dave Winer on April 23, 2007 at 8:11 am
Speed, I don’t know, but it’s a good question.
I bet “media navel-gazing” isn’t as popular as they think it is.
Dataguy, to be clear, I’m talking about TV news, it’s not about RSS. It’s what I have streaming by my ears and in the background for my eyes, while I’m writing stuff that goes out through RSS and reading other people’s stuff via RSS.
It’s in addition to the computer interface.
Posted by dataguy on April 23, 2007 at 8:19 am
I understood you were referring to TV (or a video feed). I was mentioning something that is floating around in my mind that I thought was related.
In both case there is a limited amount of time to convey as news item. In the TV scenario because the items are displayed to the use in a serial manner and in my executive RSS feed example because they have time to only review a small number of items.
My question still stands – if there is more than one story that fits your keyword subscriptions how much time does each story get and how are they prioritized?
Posted by Harold on April 23, 2007 at 8:22 am
I love it — I’d love to be able to filter my news like that. Kind of a micro-micro-newsfeed applied to a live videostream (and/or applied to a live audiostream and text stream/feed and anything else the news network[s] are pushing out).
Posted by dataguy on April 23, 2007 at 8:26 am
Maybe another way to say this is:
Once you have a method to “pull” the TV news items (rather having them “pushed” to you) that would be like having video on demand for news clips. In order, to not have to read through a list of available items, I think there needs to be a way to have the process rank the available items and display them on your TV without you having to select them yourself.
Posted by Amyloo on April 23, 2007 at 8:39 am
V. smart idea, Dave. The picture helps bring it into focus. The hurdle is the establishment; details can be sweated way down the road.
Posted by Jason Hall on April 23, 2007 at 8:58 am
I think Google News and the like are pretty close to this. While not on a story-by-story scale, I can completely remove Entertainment news from my News frontpage and tell them to show me more Technology items.
I can also make a section based off a search term, for example “harry potter”, that will show me news items specifically for that term. If they added a not operator to that, you could tell it not to show you news items about VA Tech or Anna-Nicole Smith or anything else you want.
And even with this, there are still “breaking news” items on top that display regardless of my interests.
It can’t be a huge leap to have a more fine control to the stories to display. They’re probably working on it right now.
Posted by David on April 23, 2007 at 9:03 am
Here’s the biggest problem, I think. News stations present uncategorizable stories that won’t repeat often enough to warrant a “checkbox” but you’d still want to be aware of.
Take, for example, Bloomberg’s proposal to create a “congestion charging” scheme for Manhattan. A fascinating, important proposal, no doubt. But after the news runs a single piece on it, there’s no need for much follow up. You could create a “congestion charging” box to check, but no stories may appear for a month or more. With enough of these types of stories, the screen becomes filled with checkbox clutter.
In other words, I think there still needs to be room for broadcast outlets to tell us stories about things we didn’t think were issues in the first place. They’ve been derelict in that duty. But I think we still want to preserve some of the serendipity of the news.
Posted by Jacob Levy on April 23, 2007 at 9:07 am
Dave and DataGuy
There’s no reason you cant control your TV news via preferences and filters on RSS. Its just a matter of technology. TV is a presentation format for a stream, exactly like other news sources.
The main issues for enabling this are bandwidth, bandwidth, and bandwidth 🙂 But the payout is awesome, for the networks: they get to charge differently for ads that appear pre-roll and post-roll on popular stories than for ads that appear with unpopular stories. All in all it should be a windfall for them.
Posted by Jacob Levy on April 23, 2007 at 9:09 am
> With enough of these types of stories, the screen becomes filled with
> checkbox clutter.
Thats easy enough to fix. Checkboxes for which no stories appear in N days move to a preferences page, or you could set a preference to delete them after M days if no new news appears.
Posted by Dave Winer on April 23, 2007 at 9:11 am
David, that’s not a problem — I have NY Metro checked, so I would see that story. Of course they still use their judgement.
Posted by Stephen Bove on April 23, 2007 at 9:18 am
yes…great idea…the “see no more” check box…could also be presented as a slider (values 1 to 10). 1 means really don’t show me more about yeltsin unless they find out he isn’t dead or died 20 years ago, and 10 means keep showing me everything…
agree also with Amyloo…the real problem is the various “establishments” who assert high degrees of control over tone and repeat frequency/periodicity of “messages” when topics resonate with/against their high level agendas….
Posted by Jason on April 23, 2007 at 9:43 am
I’ve been wanting something like this for years. Except, I don’t want a checkbox, I want a slider next to every story. On/off / black/white / thums-up/thumbs-down isn’t enough information. The slider sits next to the news stories. Slide left for less interest, right for more interest. Creating an almost arbitrary mathematical way of weighting these preferences and then applying them to RSS feeds in a way that actually worked would be challenging, but certainly possible.
Posted by Fertanish on April 23, 2007 at 9:54 am
From the other side, news outlets could use this data to gauge viewer ratings before news hits the air. Eventually a system could be established to set advertising rates to a particular story or feature based on the number of votes (checkboxes) a requested news story receives.
Fear would be news becomes even more entertainment based, and less attention is given to valid news stories that don’t receive enough checks. A voting system doesn’t always end in the best results.
Posted by Arek Dreyer on April 23, 2007 at 9:58 am
I’ve heard people complain that narrowcasting has the potential to allow people to filter out “general interest” stories, leading to an even greater splintering of the societal cohesion; gone is the shared experience. I love your idea.
Posted by Gerard on April 23, 2007 at 10:12 am
My God, This would have been handy when Anna Nicole Smith died.
Posted by Marty Schwimmer on April 23, 2007 at 10:23 am
Dave:
The categories on the form would change over time. ‘Gonzales’ would not always maek the short list. How often do you think the reader would be prepared to update the form and how ofter do you think the newsgatherer would want to prompt you with an updated form (because it thinks that something newsworthy has occurred)? How should the newsgatherer ping the reader that there are additions to the form? (or do you think that once the reader has selected ‘breaking news’, notice about an updated form is not urgent)?
Posted by Karoli on April 23, 2007 at 10:29 am
This is a brilliant idea! Taking it a step further, they could tag the segments so that you could choose the broadcast stream by tag and then archive the same way so that video archives are easily searchable in the future by tag.
Posted by Dave Winer on April 23, 2007 at 10:36 am
Marty, yes the categories would change. Once Gonzales resigns and returns to private life, he would unceremoniously be removed. No need to notify us because the network is capable of making an editorial decision, we’re not covering him anymore, unless something happens to make us cover him again.
That’s where Yeltsin was at end-of-business yesterday, but all of a sudden, this morning, he’s in the news again, but almost certainly will fall off the list in a few days, if not a few hours (the expected biography didn’t materialize, instead they’re running an excruciatingly boring press conference at Virginia Tech, all three major cable networks!).
I took a stab at how the network would notify the user of new categories in the italic display of Yeltsin, who is checked. He’s also bold because the current story is in his category (also International and Breaking News).
The notice is never urgent as long as new categories are checked by default, which is fine, because in the current system they all are checked and there’s not only no way to uncheck them, you can’t even see them!
Metadata is cooooool. 🙂
Posted by Kristine on April 23, 2007 at 10:50 am
Great stuff. My media habits almost amount to a similar set up today though: get most of my news via my newsreader, which meant that I only checked MSM reports on the Virginia Tech story after bloggers had alerted me to the reports from students on the ground. Only watch TV online at times of my choosing – and never live slots like news. Had I relied on newspapers and TV this past week it would have meant having mad man Cho Seung-hui staring at me from every possible media outlet, and, frankly, that would have freaked me out.
Posted by Jackson on April 23, 2007 at 10:51 am
I like the idea. Instead of being on or off, it could just make stories less likely to be next in the queue. That way, when the news started getting less interesting to you it was probably time to turn it off.
I think (as I posted on my blog) that this is kinda like a streaming video version of TailRank. Especially if you can manage an OPML (or similar) feed of what “production stations” you subscribe too (channel seems like the wrong word, and I am talking not talking about categories which span across “production stations”).
Posted by Jackson on April 23, 2007 at 10:52 am
Dave, doesn’t CNN have those kind of categories that come and go on their website? Only, they only use them for subscribe, not ignore.
Posted by Ralph Hempel on April 23, 2007 at 11:25 am
I think I’ve got an entirely different way of getting news that works for me. I have no cable or satellite TV and we live in a valley with no analog reception. We decided to cut off the cable and satellite about 4 or 5 years ago and my kids ( 3 boys, 14 year old twins and a 10 year old) are coping fairly well.
We (gasp) read the newspaper.
Sure, it’s “old” news, but you get to flip to the channel you want and skip or skip news you don’t. In the morning I’ll check my RSS feeds for really important breaking news, but other than that, I’m pretty happy to be ignorant of the endless cycle of death, shooting, war, celebrity gaffes, and the general dumbing down of our society.
When I want in-depth coverage of the war or some important social issues, I’ll catch up by reading Harper’s, The Atlantic, or browse websites that have good information on the subject.
I confirmed my suspicion about TV jumping the shark about 2 years ago when I was in a hotel and wanted to watch some “smart” TV, like Discovery and all I could find was people getting tattoos and people with tattoos taking apart and rebuilding cars and motorcycles.
I know that print journalism is changing, and that online journalism is carving out a piece of that pie, but by and large, news delivered through the medium of TV is so watered down that it becomes useless to me and my family.
That being said, I think Dave’s idea will in fact turn out to be important for people that enjoy getting their news this way, and I think it will become popular on phones as a subscription service before it becomes part of the consumer’s home media experience.
Cheers, Ralph (rapidly becoming a cranky old man)
Posted by Rich on April 23, 2007 at 11:34 am
This is really a VERY good idea. The power is in the ever-changing category options — ie, not making your choice or opt-in a one time thing. Needs and interests always change as does the intensity of the news flow.
Your idea also creates NEW jobs for news editors, ie, helping to build the upfront filters on a perpetual basis and then feeding back user feedback into the news process.
This is SO much better than one-time personalization technology it isn’t even funny…..I think you are on to something.
Posted by gzino on April 23, 2007 at 11:35 am
I believe in the vision, but how far is MSNBC or any other traditional broadcast entity from having the necessary associated metadata and indexing to pull it off in quasi real-time? Not that others that do have the capability won’t eventually occupy our TV screen, but of course the old broadcasters dominate it today.
Posted by Ian Kennedy on April 23, 2007 at 12:49 pm
The “next story” button already exists – it’s the 30-second skip feature on my Tivo remote 😉
Posted by Nick Douglas on April 23, 2007 at 1:05 pm
Love your idea, Dave. Increasing banality of Digg et al demonstrates that we need more than that to ensure relevant news. I can currently build a similar system from the other end (as many have already done) by assembling a Netvibes or Pageflakes page of “news alert” feeds from Google News.
Posted by John Furrier on April 23, 2007 at 1:13 pm
great vision Dave. I like to think of it as a ‘policy based’ news services….hey what a user experience..
what is ‘policy’ is the billion dollar question??? I’m going to start programming again 🙂
Posted by Dave Winer on April 23, 2007 at 1:32 pm
Thanks John. Everybody seems to like this one. I’ve never seen anything like it, but it’s very nice.
Someone asked earlier how you can tell which items are new? Yahoo solved that one a long time ago, the little yellow NEW icon.
Posted by Jake on April 23, 2007 at 1:33 pm
If people can handle categories and tagging, a network news organization can do it too.
Great idea for the Windows Live thingy to try to do on the XBOX 360 Live platform with MSNBC content as a starter.
For each category (such as NY Metro), there needs to be a headline feed to deal with the discovery problem.
Posted by Clay Johnson on April 23, 2007 at 1:49 pm
Every type of medium has its strengths and weaknesses. The broadcast method of television isn’t without them. Specifically, the thing you get with broadcast media is the lack of choice. That is *both* a strength and a weakness.
The weaknesses are all well known, but the strength isn’t. Specifically, what bothers me about this set-up you got here Dave is that it might just be a little dangerous. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for personalization– but the thing that drives me bananas is people listening to their own echo chamber. Simply put, this strengthens peoples ability to disregard or not hear opinions or messages they disagree with.
Sometimes this is OK, but sometimes (with politics especially) it isn’t. I’m afraid that too much news personalization gets us to a DeToquevillian nightmare where people are only listening to the opinions that they agree with. This further polarizes our already polarized country.
I’d be interested in how a system could be built to allow for personalization but still allow some opposition stuff– stuff that would still make your blood boil — to get in there. After all, nothing is achieved without real discord. And if we are programming our information sources to agree with us all the time, then we’re never going to hear the other side. That scares me.
Posted by Jason Suess on April 23, 2007 at 3:30 pm
The basics of what you want have been built by a news channel in Germany (N-TV) as an add-in for Media Center. If you have Vista Home Premium or Vista Ultimate you can give it a try. You can tune into their live broadcast, see past news items, customize the information displayed on their ticker, reverse and fast forward their ticker, see information related to the video being displayed, etc.
Info page: http://www.n-tv.com/itv
Direct link to install: http://www.n-tv.de/s/downloads/ntvplus_1_1_0.msi
Posted by Hil on April 23, 2007 at 4:18 pm
I’ve had a similar wish for a while now, Dave. Because I usually read a number of different papers, I would like to extend the idea, so that as well as, or instead, of it being specific to one news service, I could draw in coverage from a number of news sources (of my choice), so that when I looked at any particular checked topic/tag I could see a broader aggregated overview, even if it was only in headline or precis form links.
Perhaps this means that in addition to each particular news service allowing a checklist filter like you suggest, it should be possible to make one’s own personalised news site that picks up the topic/tag feeds from your checklist. I guess it would be similar the homepages with widget news feeds that we already have (netvibes etc) but topic/tag feeds instead coming in newsriver form from a number of selected sources. It would be nice for those of us who have a preference for visuals accompaning text to also be able to customise such a page so that it looked more like a newspaper than a bunch of widgets.
Then we could have a Share Your News site :).
Posted by Hil on April 23, 2007 at 4:34 pm
Sorry, I guess you were talking about TV news, but maybe the aggregation idea would transfer over to TV news, too.
Posted by Derrick Oien on April 23, 2007 at 5:06 pm
I love this idea. When the psycho astronaut chick in diapers was usurped from the news by Anna Nicole overdosing, I thought it really cheated the astronaut of her 15 minutes and in general I wished the both of them would just go away. Much like the crazy college student in Blacksburg. Ok, got it. Horrible tragedy. Can we not sensationalize it and let these people mourn with dignity? Please? If I could just make them go away and see news that isn’t boiled down into 5 minute soundbites I’d think we would be helping mankind move things forward away from an idiocracy.
-Derrick
Posted by Jim Armstrong on April 23, 2007 at 6:15 pm
I would like the important news ( that I have checked in my preferences ) to pop up in the application that I’m using in a format that resembles NetNewsWire or iTunes.
Like this..
Posted by Stewart on April 23, 2007 at 10:10 pm
hmm some of the digital news channels in the UK have better interfaces and choices; what i’d like are the links to the background information. So the Yeltsin story would bring up a biography, archive footage and images, wikipedia perhaps etc, with sources chosen by myself
Posted by Jean Doute on April 24, 2007 at 2:05 am
Aren’t there like a zillion TV channels available, that simply aren’t used because no one can produce that much programming?
Why not split the news by category (or tags) across many channels, rather than filtering one big feed. Then we could use our current methods of browsing the station guide, creating “favorites” lists with our remote controls, etc. to tune in what we want/don’t want to see.
With a little work and an intelligent TV front end, we could also choose to aggregate, show/hide “already viewed” clips and so forth. I’m so sick of watching cycles of news I’ve already seen to catch the occasional new story…
Posted by Jeremiah Owyang on April 24, 2007 at 2:44 am
I’d also add the element of live streaming as part of the content in that river of news.
If someone ‘influential’ had something to add in real time, they would appear on a highlighted section of the site to add more value. Of course, they could field questions in real time.
Posted by Rich on April 24, 2007 at 5:27 am
Clay Johnson takes this down a not very useful path. We’re talking about fine-tuning the spigot on the news flow here, not sorting for political leaning….notice how Dave turned this on against the MSNBC news page (which I would argue is fairly non-partisan) rather than the NY Times OpEd page or some mashed-up feed of political mag site RSS feeds. Stopping the flow of news on Virginia Tech or Imus isn’t going to limit the spectrum of views you consume on these already over-covered topics; it’s going to clear room for other news to get through via the side door.
Posted by Ben Kimball on April 24, 2007 at 5:44 am
I got a Nintendo Wii a little while back. It connects to the net over WiFi, and includes a “News channel.” As far as I can tell, it’s a text feed of the AP wire, broken down into (broad) categories, like “Sports”, “Local”, and “Business”. What makes it relevant is that you tell the Wii which categories you’re interested in, and it stops showing you the other stuff. If Nintendo or AP would make this more granular, tagging stories by topic in addition to category, you’d be most of the way there.
As an aside, reading the newspaper on a big-screen TV from your living room recliner is surprisingly nice. The Wii’s text-zooming and panning features are well-designed. And its included Opera browser is also well-done, though I miss my desktop’s keyboard.
Posted by Clay Johnson on April 24, 2007 at 6:01 am
Actually Rich, that’s exactly my point.
This technology would allow you to turn MSNBC *into* fox news or the new york times if you wanted.
I am a Republican and no longer wish to hear anything regarding impeachment.
I’m a Democrat, and no longer wish to hear the president speak. Uncheck Bush.
I’m Palestinian. Please keep all of the stuff regarding Israel off my television set.
I’m Israeli. Please keep anything referring to “Palestine” off my TV.
“I am so sick of hearing about prayer in school. Let me turn that one off”
My point is really simple and obvious. People *need* information that makes them uncomfortable. Perhaps more than anything. It is what activates people to become engaged in their government.
Presently, broadcast media is already walking down this road– of lumping us Americans into two big red and blue tribes — one news station, Fox, talking to the reds, and another, CNN talking to the blues.
And yes, MSNBC is in between. And nobody watches it. And everybody should.
Posted by Jon Allen on April 24, 2007 at 6:17 am
Yes, Clay
You are right about what it takes to keep an informed citizenry current. It takes an inclusive reporting network with minimal filtering. Unfortunately, no one network really fills that need. The vast majority of news is gathered from the northern hemisphere, despite the horrible conflicts which rage south of the equator. The only thing I’d like to add is that this user filtered news scheme that is being proposed could also be used to ‘unbias’ the selection of news items. Since so many trivial events in the US get tremendous coverage while greatly important changes elswhere get sidelined, the ability of an individual news viewer to selectively say ‘enough, already!’ to adnauseum reporting on American trivialities is only fitting.
Posted by aharden on April 24, 2007 at 6:44 am
I’ve been filtering news using Bloglines subscriptions to specific Google News search-result feeds for a while now, and it works pretty well although I do get duplicates quite a bit. The feeds are not full-text, but they have enough of an excerpt to allow me to decide to click through to the original article. I bet Google News could produce a search feed generator interface that included a dynamic hierarchy of category/subject filters similar to what Dave describes. The feed could then be consumed through Google News itself, a smart browser that renders the feed nicely for viewing, or an app of the user’s choosing.
Posted by Solo on April 24, 2007 at 7:34 am
Just in case you missed it, there is a great Ted Rall cartoon on the relative tragedies of Virginia Tech and the Iraq debacle:
http://news.yahoo.com/comics/uclickcomics/20070421/cx_tr_uc/tr20070421;_ylt=AplJW_wppr7uazdV3q5xI8EXvTYC
If that link doesn’t work, it’s his Saturday, April 21st comic.
Posted by Bill Seitz on April 24, 2007 at 8:51 am
As someone noted above, the TiVo skip-ahead button gives some of the benefit to this.
If you think of TiVo/DVR recording as similar to Dave’s old PayloadForRss model, one possible architecture becomes clear. You’re pulling in multiple sources, but only displaying a selection of what you “downloaded”.
You have 2 key interfaces: the remote control, and the PC. The former gives you some coarse opportunity for thumbsUp/thumbsDown, which requires some interpretation (if a particular story has many different tags, which one (if any) drove your rating?). The latter lets you be more explicit (I don’t want to hear any more about AnnaNicole, but other celebrity plastic surgery and drug abuse stories are fine).
Then you have the whole Folksonomy/SocialNetworking thing of taking into account ratings of your “friends”, etc.
Posted by Bill Seitz on April 24, 2007 at 10:46 am
The meta-question is: why watch TV news? I drink my coffee with BlogLines.
If I’m busy and moving around, then news is just distracting anyway. I’d probably rather have music playing. Or ambient sound from somewhere…
Posted by Bill Seitz on April 24, 2007 at 11:01 am
If the Replay DVR could auto-identify commercials, I bet today’s DVR could auto-split newscasts by story.
Posted by Jake on April 24, 2007 at 1:54 pm
Awesome idea, Dave. Obviously impossible to implement on traditional TV, but have you seen the quality of the Netflix Watch it Now service? Your idea would be totally kick-ass using that technology. The slider idea someone mentioned above is definitely the way to go.
Posted by Patrizia Broghammer on April 25, 2007 at 12:21 am
Not a bad idea.
“NEWS on demand”. I just get what I want and what I pay for.
In this river of everyday news I will be able to decide what I am going to read.
But before being able to decide what I want to, I should also be able to see what they offer…
So we go back again.
News is what happened, and may be I am also interested in what I do not think I could be interested… that happens quite often to me, I am just a human being after all…
Posted by Andrew Tyndall on April 27, 2007 at 11:32 am
Heard about this discussion from Adrian Monck.
At the Tyndall Report we have gone part of the way using original content from the broadcast networks’ weekday nightly newscasts. We present rundowns each day of the unbundled stories the networks chose to present. For customization, users can go to Tyndall Search and create a URL including any story title, topic theme or word string. Save that URL and whenever you refresh it will automatically add any new videothat falls into your chosen search category.
Cheers
Andrew Tyndall
Posted by Andrew Tyndall on April 27, 2007 at 11:57 am
oops. Adrian Monck is here.
Posted by Stuart Watson on April 29, 2007 at 8:07 pm
Dave,
I like the concept. Let’s combine the ideas of a central OPML, publishers creating story feeds (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Story_feed), and my various devices/applications that support RSS also can subscribe to the OPML file.
Now I consume the stories I’m interested in when, how, and where I want. Read more hear – http://www.syndicationgumption.com/web/rssense/talkback/story_rss_feed_alternative_tv_news_consumption
Looking forward to hear your thoughts.
Stuart
Posted by Phil Bowman on May 3, 2007 at 7:02 am
This just appeared on the EDS blog:
http://www.eds.com/sites/cs/blogs/eds_next_big_thing_blog/archive/2007/05/02/enterprise-news-of-the-future.aspx
“When I think of information overload, I think of it as bad context or personalization, maybe something like this would help.”