I’ve been following the story of James Kim and his family over the past week. CNN has a nice little box at the top of their developing stories that gives you the newest bullet points on a story, which made me remember something I had started thinking about when I was waiting to see if Jim Webb would beat George Allen last month: the use of reverse chronological posts, i.e., the weblog format.
When I know nothing about a given topic, which is most of the time regarding breaking news, I want a well-written article that tells me what’s going on. But when I’m following a developing story, I just want to be able to log in and read the latest, since I already know all the backstory that makes up the bulk of the article. News sites could easily include a sidebar in every story with time-stamped information, so that I could tell at a glance if anything new had happened since the last time I checked in on a story. From there, it wouldn’t be hard to offer individual RSS feeds for that category of stories, with links to the full articles for further reading.
See also: A fundamental way news sites need to change.