Today’s DMN story on a neighborhood-naming contest was the first real coverage I’ve seen of the Ferguson Road Initiative, the confederation of neighborhood associations that’s trying to weed out crime in my part of town. That led to it being reported read on the news radio stations this morning.
I’m glad of the publicity, but as I’ve reported before, there’s a lot more of interest there — specifically the weed and seed grant that could make a big dent in neighborhood crime.
But based on the coverage today, if I was just learning about the group, where would I easily find more? Would I care to based on a story that touches on little more than the naming issue?
This isn’t a complaint about the specific story, but there needs to be a way to connect the archive of information on such a topic and make it easy for someone to find more depth. That’s an open archive, and that’s tagging. And it’s presenting it in a way that the user doesn’t even have to understand that tags are driving it.
At the same time, some questions in a TV interview I gave yesterday (more on that later) reminded me of why blogs, or any other format of non-professional news can’t be comprehensive. Brilliant? Insightful? High-quality? Absolutely.
But comprehensive in a way that a daily newspaper and a blog can’t be. That’ll be something…
UPDATE: Another way of looking at it? The Long Tail without filters is just noise.
