[IMC-Tech] categorization & editorial policy

[Josh Marcus]

This conversation about how to organize and share independent
news and opinion is very exciting to me (whoo!) -- I hope this conversation
will continue until we come up with a fair and functional plan.

I have some ideas about specific topics that I hope will be explored by
independent journalism, and ways to categorize the ones that already exist,
but I have some questions about the ways topics should be determined and
also what we want them to do.  For example, should topics distinguish between
news and editorials?  I would find that useful.  If I have a story on my
local imc site about a local issue, should the story be categorized by
the fact that it is about local Philadelphia issues?  I think I would also
find that useful.  So I think I'd like to suggest that we think about a topics
model where it is possible for a story to fall under multiple categories,
which are not necessary simply 'topics'.

I also am nervous about topics that are too specific that aren't in a
hierarchy (can we use another term for hierarchy, like 'tree' or something?).  
Most news sites have very, very general topics ('Politics', 'Business', 
'Editorials', etc.') and I actually find those exceptionally useful when
browsing for the stories that I actually want to read online.  Some news
sites offer personalized news pages, where you can click the specific topics
that interest you, but yet I'm usually reluctant to do that.
 
For example, if we start up topical IMC sites, it immediately becomes useful
to have a subcategory for alternative energy on the environmentally focused
IMC site.  I don't think we want to not allow new topics -- because that
is actually very important power -- so we want a structure that's flexible
as possible.  I could easily imagine wanting to see just articles about 
alternative energy over the last year.  On the other hand, I shouldn't have
to search specifically for articles about alt. energy if I just want to
republish some environmental articles for my local IMC site.  The hierarchy
of topics makes more sense to me and also makes flexibility less threatening
to the usefulness of the topics.  (Though, as a counterpoint to this example,
we could just have a vast list of topics and mark all articles about
alternative energy as also being in a general 'environment' category.  But
I think that sounds messy and would make it impossible for a normal submitter
to categorize their own piece.)

I also think we should assume that it's okay for other people besides the
original submitter to categorize if some media can be categorized in multiple
ways.  I don't necessarily want to ask someone to categorize their submission
as being news, local philly, about the criminal justice system, and also about
police brutality specifically -- but it could be useful to have all of these
categorizations.  So I guess I think we shouldn't not use a healthy tree 
because of the difficulties in representing them simply on a web page.
I'm confident a reasonable balance could be worked out.

SUMMARY: I'd like to see the concept of 'topics' expanded out into the
idea of 'categories'.  Categories might describe the type of content, the
community the source came from, the topic, (the language??) etc.  Articles
could fall under multiple categories.  I'd hope to see as few as possible
broad categories at the top of the tree (hierarchy), which we would hopefully
allow the categories underneath to change and live as necessary without the
need for any central organization to reorganize the whole category structure.

--j