news-examples

News Examples

This page serves to document the current list of news examples from real world sites for the design of a simple news microformat. -Jonathan Malek

Contributors

• Jonathan Malek
• Stuart Myles
• Martin Moore
• Mark Ng
• Ben Campbell

The Problem

There have been several efforts to define data formats for textual news content: most focus on the exchange of news information between organizations, rather than the presentation of news on the web. Where presentation has been considered, it has more often than not been without a focus on exposing the semantic value present in each story. And finally, in those cases where there has been an effort to use a microformat or similar means of exposing semantic value (for example, using hAtom to markup a blog post), the data format does not fully describe the news story, leaving important data unparseable.

Real World Examples

News hosted on aggregator sites

• Yahoo! News
  • Source: Associated Press
    • Headline
    • Byline
    • Source Organization
    • Updated date and time
    • Content
      • Dateline
    • Contributor declaration
    • License or Copyright statement
    • Categories
  • Source: Reuters
    • Headline
    • Source Organization
    • Updated date and time
    • Content
      • Dateline
      • Entities (inline)
    • Byline
    • Contributor declaration
    • License or Copyright statement
    • Categories
  • Source: McClatchy Newspapers
    • Headline
    • Source Organization
    • Byline
    • Updated date time
    • Content
      • Dateline
      • Entities (inline)
    • Contributor declaration
    • Related Stories

News on publisher sites

• Sacramento Bee
  • Headline
  • Byline
    • Journalist contact
  • Created (published) date time
  • Updated date time
  • Content
  • Contributor declaration
  • Categories (tags)
• Reuters
  • Headline
  • Updated date time
  • Byline
    • Title
    • Contact
  • Content
    • Dateline
    • Entities (inline)
  • License or Copyright statement
• New York Times
  • Headline
  • Byline
  • Created date (no time)
  • Content
    • Dateline
    • Entities (inline)
  • Contributor declaration
  • Related Stories/Past Coverage

Notes: Inline Entities can be thought of as a form of rel-tag inline with the rest of the story. Typically, the links take you to an "authority" page that contains a list of links to stories related to the entity.

Analysis of Examples

Common news fields

• headline
• Byline
• Dateline
• content
• published date time
• updated date time
• categories (tags)
• source organization (which may differ from journalist's organization)
• license

See Also

• news-formats
• news-brainstorming

Original news-examples rationale

Microformats have many benefits for news reporting:

• Distributed Reporting

News can be reported on various platforms and services, and be identified, aggregated, and re-distributed to local aggregators and wire services.

• Pro-Am Journalism

Microformats allow anyone to report news without needing to use an exclusive or proprietary application. So long as other services can perform searches or real-time analysis of incoming items, news content can be recognized.

• Topical Filtration

As the volume of news increases, rel-tags and more news-specific microformats can be by topic-specific services to filter news content.

• Content-Type Filtration

Specific news-related content such as statistics and quotes can be laid out automatically into infographics and generally better-formatted presentation.