On GigaOm, Mathew Ingram posits that the traditional structure of the news article may not be ideally serving today’s readers. Some articles discussing current events may be loaded with terminology that some readers can’t understand—but adding background would waste space from the point of those who know the subject well.

In the current on-line era, of course, there are plenty of external sources of information that could be linked—such as Wikipedia, if nothing else—but many papers don’t bother with that sort of linking, and if they did link would rather link internally to their own sources in order to keep readers viewing more of their own ads.

Ingram quotes people such as journalism professor Jeff Jarvis discussing ways that on-line news media could evolve to “explode” traditional stories into separate story chunks—one publication might provide the news, another the explanation, another data, and so on, and these separate sources would interlink so readers could build their own news story, smorgasbord-style.

Something I find kind of amusing about the article is that it includes a link to a Storify discussion collection at the same time it talks about ways to aggregate different types of documents together into stories—without ever connecting up the fact that this is the same sort of thing Storify does.

Anyway, I always find these discussions about the future of journalism fascinating. They remind me that changes in technology do shape the way in which we read and learn about the world around us, sometimes in ways we could never have predicted. Will news delivery evolve into build-your-own storylets? It’s at least possible. I wonder how on-line news will look in ten years.

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