Recently my attention has been drawn to the Dutch news website www.en.nl. Wilbert Baan, interaction designer for the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant, told me he wants to see “what we can do with news, social networks, wikis and more.

“I think you might like the experiment we are doing,” he wrote.

And bloody hell was he right.

The first thing that strikes you about the site is the bar chart across the top of the page, replacing the traditional masthead. This is a newsriver:

Down the outside column is a list of articles from the past hour:

That’s culture shift number 1.

At the bottom of the page you will find recent images, social bookmark sites, most commented articles from the past 24 hours, most important and most viewed.

Culture shift number 2 is the list of incoming links to this article – something built into the very fabric of blogs (pingback) but so far either anathema to mainstream publishers (“send our readers elsewhere?”), or difficult with current content management systems.

And with one simple move the site demonstrates it’s part of the conversation.

The ‘most important’ list is also worth looking at. How did they decide what was “most important?” I asked.

“We are using around ten variables to decide what’s important news. The variables we’re using right now are pageviews, visits from external websites, unique referrers to an article, comments, votes (4 options) and the press agency urgency variable (3 options; normal, high, very high).

“By showing it next to the most viewed we can easily see how it works and adjust the settings to make it better. It’s not perfect yet, but it already works remarkably well.

“We could extend this even further (tags, edits, tag removals) or skip some. All the variables are connected to points, we can set a default amount of points to a variable and define or redefine the value for the website.

“We also made a tag sniffer at http://www.skitch.com/wilbertbaan/8733/en-tag-sniffing – it scans the text on certain names and auto tags the article.”

Wilbert’s next step is building a community that can contribute to make this website better with ideas or criticism. The newspaper is already conducting a conversation with readers on a NING social network where users can contribute new ideas and discuss the website (in Dutch), but clearly this is just the start.

“For example we could connect a popular social network to the website and use what your network reads to alter the presentation of the news. Or make section pages, or a frontpage?

And all this is possible because of a Holovaty-esque focus on the power of databases.

“The most important object is the database,” he writes on his blog. “We designed the database from a view that almost everything is possible with the data. We store a lot of information that might be valuable in the future. This allows us to experiment freely with the design and think up new features. The database is the most valuable asset of a news organization.”
And this means they can do “Almost everything. We can make mash-ups, feeds, aggregated pages. Hook in to social networks, extend the wiki functionality, and more. Technically everything is possible.”

Keep an eye on this one.

UPDATE: Wilbert writes: “We have added feeds for every tag, latest news and breaking news. We have also added a personal feed that can be created by selecting the tags you like or don’t like. Very rudimentary, but it is a first experiment with personalization (My feed: http://en.nl/en/my_rss.php?editorId=3) and you can take it anywhere you want.

“With these feeds we are encouraging developers to experiment with news sorting and make their own interface or mash-up.”

Read more posts about future newspapers here

De Volkskrant’s Harry Potter multimedia interactive isn’t quite what I meant when I talked about the ‘Daily Prophet’ approach to video journalism, but it’s a nice twist on the idea…

Bas Timmers is Newsroom Editor at Dutch broadsheet de Volkskrant. This post is also available at http://www.bastimmers.nl/diginewsuk.php

“In the virtual world a year only lasts three months,” a manager once sighed. The innovations keep on coming very quickly indeed on the web, and a success story can turn into a tale of shattered dreams within months. Kazaa and ICQ were once extremely popular, for instance, but are now only marginal players on the web.

This high speed of innovation doesn’t mean that you cannot draw any lessons from the past. For example, Pablo J. Boczkowski was examining three online projects at American newspapers already in 1999 and 2000, but the conlusions he drew are still applicable.

At the New York Times he was studying the technology section; with the Houston Chronicle he was on board at the Virtual Voyager project; and with New Jersey Online he was examining a web tool for communities.

Boczkowski (by now a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) wrote about his findings in the book Digitizing the News. Everyone reading this sometimes rather academic work will sometimes have to suppress a smile of nostalgia when looking at the screenshots. But the conclusions are still very much 2007.

He observed that newspaper publishers had already been experimenting with digital techniques (Videotext for instance) for thirty years. Not for the sake of innovation, but to protect their advertising market. Defensive, not offensive.

This explains why on the internet other players (Google News for instance) are much more succesful. These companies don’t think with paper products in the back of their minds. They don’t have to save scoops for tomorrow’s paper thingy. They are more flexible, more creative.

As far as I am concerned, you can add one more important reason for these differences in success. Newspapers online have to carry the DISadvantage of their paper image. In the world of dailies lives the widespread misconception that the name of the newspaper is such a strong brand, that it serves as a traffic magnet online as well. But it only gives them a headstart, and even then only in certain segments of the market.

Yes, faithful readers of dailies will also know how to find ‘their’ newspaper on the web: they associate it with quality and reliability. But there are also other, bigger groups in society (and it’s not only youngsters) that associate the product with the terms old-fashioned, biased and occasionally ‘something for the high-society’. In that case the title of the newspaper becomes a burden instead of a blessing.

This is indeed only about marketing and not about content. Traditional journalists will be horrified and blame the younger generation. Yeah, right. The generation that was said to not be reading papers anymore, but nonetheless embraced free dailies in a spectacular way in the past five years…

Instead of blaming others, newspaper publishers ought to be developing new, strong online brands alongside their dailies. No more volkskrant.nl, sueddeutsche.de or scotsman.com for example, but vk.nl, sz.de and… sm.com? Or did anybody already claim that last one?
Note: In an experiment with monetisation, Digitizing the News and other online journalism books can now be ordered through the Online Journalism Blog shop.

Bas Timmers is Newsroom Editor at Dutch broadsheet de Volkskrant

It´s 2015. Newspapers don´t exist anymore. At least, not as a mass medium. Because everyone is living in his own cocoon, his own little world, assembled to his own preferences. Customizable, as the phenomenon is generally called. A television(or a computer screen or electronic paper?) displays documentaries and YouTube-like videos from internet users with the same preferences and the same lifestyle. The mp3-player pounds out songs automaticallty that fit the mood of its user, because the bloody thing can sense the mental state of of its boss. And in the meantime it also suggests some new songs that might match his preference.

The journal, on paper or on a foldable piece of ultra-thin e-paper, is tailor-made: a bit of politics, a snack of showbiz news, some sports and a lot of news about gadgets. Information that, by the way, is still supplied by the good old-fashioned newspaper company, that doesn’t make newspapers any more but rather focuses on delivering written content accompanied by videos and hyperlinks. And ads that match the profile of the user of course, but only if he wants that to happen.

The consumer keeps track of the latest news in his own world of expertise through rss feeds or something similar. And with a mini-broadcasting device (a sniffer) he scans his immediate environment to see whether there are friends and/or interesting people in the pub, cinema or shopping mall where he is. So he doesn’t need to ask his friend where they are, or lose time with chit-chatting with some rather boring people.

This consumer only buys in virtual stores. He gets advice from the iLama, the internet version of the Dalai Lama. On the basis of advice from other consumers and his buying behavior this iLama decides what devices to buy and not to buy. The real social network is only formed by physical friends: the rest happens through virtual online networks. Those friends do get an unlimited view in his life, though: where he is, what he does, when, what his calendar looks like, which movies he watches, what music he listens to, etc. Because he is king of his own world…

Science fiction? You bet. But the workshop I AM 2015 was all about dreaming up scenarios for the future.

Teachers, filmmakers, internet editors (like me), interface designers and other folks created the iLama. It may sound unlikely, but in his introduction consultant Krijn Schuurman pointed out what has happened in the past ten years: email, the growth of online shops, downloading movies, cell phone payments, a second-hand market online, voice recognition, MySpace, YouTube, Google. An impressive list that only few would have dared to dream up in 1997. With that in mind the iLama doesn’t seem so unlikely.

(Although the idea for special glasses that make boring people invisible on the street was very, uh, futuristic.)

Inspiring it was indeed, as was the entire Picnic ’07 event. The multimedia conference in Amsterdam was a mix of keynote speeches, workshops, network events and drinking a beer. Ideal for people who are orienting themselves to the future of online news. That is what this weekly column will be all about. Now just hope that I’ve got enough inspiration to produce something every week until 2015…

Bas Timmers
Newsroom editor at the Dutch daily quality newspaper de Volkskrant