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.