It always pays for news organizations to think creatively about enabling access to their content. Bill Doskoch, an online journalist in Toronto, Canada, recently offered an option for augmenting the controversial New York Times site redesign with a topic-oriented wiki.
Doskoch thinks the Times' new
topic pages are "weakly organized (descending chronological order, no explanatory article or timeline or other feature to highlight the most important content, making search the only option) and thus not as useful as they could be."
He suggests, "You know what might make a NYT topic page sing? Associating it with a wiki, or possibly multiple wikis."
I tend to agree. Adding one or more wikis to the mix might not only enhance usability and access, but also serendipity, engagement, and even revenue. Keep in mind that wikis are very flexible and customizable tools. This wouldn't necessarily have to be a full-on, Wikipedia-style wiki where anyone could rewrite Times stories and headlines. It could be a reader-created index, where readers get to define topical connections among stories covered by the Times, with links to specific stories or photos, and perhaps with reader comments or ratings.
I don't think I've seen a wiki used in this way yet, but I'd love to see someone try.
Doskoch continued, "I don't know if they'd want to let just anybody participate. Maybe they could restrict it to TimesSelect subscribers, with staff approving entries. Maybe they could provide an incentive, like crediting a subscriber's account with more free archive searches for each approved wiki posting that reader makes."
He argues that there's a business case for the wiki approach: "The vast majority of content on the Times topic pages is more than seven days old, which means one can only access it via an archive search. The easier the Times makes it to find content that is truly valuable, the more those (I suspect) profitable archive pages will be retrieved. Also, this could increase demand for TimesSelect memberships."
(Thanks to Bill Doskoch for granting permission to publish excerpts from his recent posting to the Online News Association discussion list here.)
I've thought about the potential SEO benefits of topic pages....
