Building reference material into news sites
Two recent posts dealing with building static (or relatively static) reference material into news sites to augment the flow of day-to-day news … and, yes, this is one of those posts that’s more for my own future reference than anything else:
Robin Sloan writes at Snarkmarket about the economics concept of stock and flow and relates it to media:
Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people that you exist.
Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.
Ryan Sholin writes at Invisible Inkling about how this relates to online news:
“Breaking News” is the treadmill. It’s the “flow” that keeps your audience engaged, coming back, checking your site or your blog, turning on the TV, visiting your national news site on their phone first thing in the morning to check if anything has blown up overnight, subscribed to your hyperlocal blog’s e-mail updates, checking their RSS feeds to see what’s new. And that’s crucial to building and engaging online news consumers.
But it doesn’t last. The stuff that does last? The most obvious answers include investigative and enterprise reporting, but I think there’s room these days for great infographics and data visualizations, too. …
Recommended: Find the balance, online producer, between churning out a steady stream of content and taking time to build something of lasting value beyond the next few hours.
For a lot of sites, it probably wouldn’t take more than a few hits per day for a piece of “stock,” over the course of a year, to yield just as much traffic as the average “flow” story.