Jeff Jarvis, journalism professor at the City University of New York writes a very interesting article in today’s Media Guardian - The end of the story as we know it - in which he muses about conventional newspaper articles - print and digital - proving inadequate in covering the complex news happening today. This is especially true now when the story’s as big as the current financial crisis and the not-somuch-looming-as-already-here recession. This got me thinking that what he has to say is relevant beyond the sphere of conventional journalism, and touches on the what all organisations - whatever their sector - need to think about as part of their communications mix.

He refers to an essay by Meg Hourihan (of Pyra Labs that became Blogger) that argued the atomic unit of digital media is no longer the publication, section, page or article, but the blog post of which there may be millions. He explains that having to sift these isn’t enough to work as an organising principle for informing, and that we need “order atop” these countless atoms. The most important tool for creating this order atop is the link. “The link becomes as important as the brand in news”.

However, links by themselves are not enough, and we need a structure, a landscape - or as he puts it “magnetic poles” - to gather news around and to organise it. Newspapers traditionally use topics, but these are usually just lists of their own content and designed for Google’s SEO, not specifically to help or attract the audience. What’s needed is more than these topic pages that essentially act as an archive.

What would be attractive is a resource that is created, curated, edited and discussed. It will be a new form of aggregator mash-up - bringing together articles, blogs, wiki’s in a way that treats topics as ongoing, cumulative processes of learning. These ideas remind me of some work we did a few years ago for the National Enterprise Workflow Project for the UK government, where we created “learning logs” (this was before Blogs became mainstream) that encouraged recording of learning, structured that information and provided tools to dig and search it, and ultimately lead to the creation of the Workflow Toolkit. Extending those ideas by mashing-up social web services such as blogs, twitter feeds, wiki’s and newsfeeds, but with a “human” topic curator could be a good start.

Jeff Jarvis suggests a few improbable names for such an interactive aggregating mash-up - Topic Table, Beat Bliki, or News Brain. I think I prefer our original name - Learning Logs, or maybe Learning Blogs - but I’m open to suggestions!