Atomized news: As a music video

Here’s a post that I’ll admit is a bit ephemeral.

Circa, Vox, AJ Plus, Timeline, Newsbound and others all play in a similar space with atomized news. It’s one that I helped pioneer at Circa but is spreading. They all do news snippets or news atoms that are threaded together to provide context. I distinguish this from, Inside.com or Techmeme (just snippets) because it’s the combining of these bits of information that provide meaning over time.

As noted in a recent Neiman piece: “If the now much-maligned inverted pyramid — the foundation of AP-like “new top” writing, ironically thrust on the news industry of the time by an earlier tech upheaval, the arrival of the telegraph — is being replaced here, we might call it a diverted pyramid.”

We are playing in a space where we are deconstructing the news in the hopes of putting it back together.

It’s a small but growing club. And I suspect we share a lot in common – including mutual respect for the editorial work that goes into this type of storytelling. Each “atom” is deceptively simple.  Yet it has to be enticing enough to keep your attention – so you continue watching. And in the end – somehow they have to combined to mean something.

And that brings me to the video below. It’s a beautiful song but the video – it feels somehow like the artistic/video equivalent of atomized news. Each snippet is intoxicating – hard to turn away from. And even without knowing it – they add up to something greater than the sum of their parts.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *