Hey there Andy,

A quick comment on this point:

“I can understand this approach but I personally feel that the context in which an article is published is vital to understanding its importance at a particular time, particularly as New Internationalist is a magazine and not a news site.”

Hopefully, as someone who’s so steeped in “all things web(tm),” you get the irony of heralding New Internationalist as a “magazine,” and championing that they should reinforce that idea ON THE WEB.  ;-)

Many of us working with organizations like NI are trying to promote the idea that a magazine—or a newspaper, or a book, etc.—is just one MEDIUM though which ideas are transmitted. Many of us try to promote the idea that those few organizations that are able to translate their ideas across NEW and old mediums, are the ones that will continue to be relevant to readers.

So, the idea that a magazine is a magazine, and a news site is a news site, seems a tad contradictory (especially when coming from a web-thinker like Andy Clark!). Following on that: what is news? What’s a news site? Let’s look at New Internationalist: they publish stories about the people, the idea, and the action in the fight for global justice. These stories are timely, focus issues that impact people’s lives (or will impact them eventually), and so on. Maybe it’s not “hard news,” but it’s not sports coverage either.

Here’s a great example. The most recently published feature on the NI site is “Legitimate indigenous protests against Peru’s latest free trade agreements have led to bloodshed following the Government’s decision to send in the military. This story is covering events that are unfolding right now now in Peru. How is that not news?

Think about Iran. New Internationalist did a whole magazine on Iran that is probably more relevant today than it was when it was published two years ago. How is that not news?

News is changing. News is being re-invented.

So my plea is: Let’s not put NI in a box unnecessarily. Nobody knows what the future of printed, dead-tree, magazines is going to be. So, from my perspective, NI *is* a news organization: NI is a public-interest news organization, a educator, a trusted information source, a network of agitators, and a spotlight shined on injustice—no matter what the medium is.

Phillip.

Even for my tiny sites with only five years of content, what I wrote about CSS three years ago might not be relevant today, but it still may be interesting in the context of what we knew or the browsers of the day. But how does a visitor see that context?

Agreed. And we’ve struggled with this on the NI Web Team over the years. However, it’s the same struggle that all news organizations have: content becomes outdated relatively quickly online.

For some NI content—like the Country Profiles—it was decided that older Country Profiles, which could be misleading (> 5 years), would expire from the site and simply re-direct visitors to the Country Profiles section. And, similarly, we’ve talked about having an “archives” indicator of some kind, to indicate content that’s over a certain age (similar to the new/old article treatment you’ve pioneered). In any scenario—and like all online publications do— we have to believe that the reader is astute enough to check the date of an article for currency.

But, as we think more and more about the curation of NI’s content online, we come back to the idea of the “evergreen” content—information that remains relevant for a long time—and how we can re-mix that content with newer content, and different kinds of content (audio, video, rss from other sites, and so on) to create new editorial offerings. Specifically, we’ve been planning a new “Themes” section (referred to in the layouts as “Topics,” I believe) and “Guides,” which NI has always done a great job with, e.g.: http://www.newint.org/publications/no-nonsense-guides/

All of that trends away from thinking of NI as a “magazine” in the online space. And, as the NI blogs grow, and as we move certain parts of the magazine (e.g., the “Currents” section, which is rarely _current_ in the printed magazine) toward being online content first that then makes it way to the magazine, and as we continue to encourage the editors to do more of their upfront issue thinking and planning online, NI could start to become something closer to the Huffington Post than it is today.

Whatever the future holds, it’s all very exciting.  :-)

Phillip.