Bleeding and leading -- surfacing news and info in a new era
Years ago newspapers and their news sites aimed for the same things: relevance and timeliness.
For the .coms of major publications (and minor ones too) this meant putting breaking news on the homepage, reflecting the editors’ curated hierarchy (A1 stories went to the top) as well as associating content so that readers could dig in on topics that interested them, as they were driven by news events. Since then the digital world has revolved several times and now we have social channels we wished we’d dreamed of, devices on our wrists, and Hadoop clusters that enable vast data analysis and machine learning.
News sources like BuzzFeed are even talking about killing their .coms.
All these things taken together require a more nuanced view of relevance and timeliness.
LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner in a recent Re/Code interview defines relevance as multidimensional and contingent on three things: social (what’s shared/promoted in your graph), machine learning (algorithms), and curation (the human editor element).
Yes, it is all these things. Now,what new dimensions are there for timeliness?
The answer to this is probably NOT the “semi-infinite” scroll, but may be stories surfaced for you based on where you are and what you’re doing (as told by your mobile).
