Beyond Automated Story Aggregation
The Tool: WordPress workaround for creating customizable “topical” news pages
Why Use It: Build destination sub-sites for your news outlet that aren’t limited to automatically aggregating similar stories into categories
WordPress, once considered mainly a tool for bloggers, has become a standby for quick-to-launch, easy-to-operate news web sites. One of the strengths of WordPress has been the ability to use story tags and categories to group similar content, such as local business coverage or cultural happenings. But now a new toolkit has been developed that allows producers to get around the key limitation of that automated aggregation — the lack of creative control over the resulting “topical” news page.
The team at Knight Digital Media Center has created a straightforward toolkit that lets producers and editors make topic-focused news pages, but with distinct, original and easy-to-maintain page elements, while still grouping content automatically around a news subject or theme.
One of the most notable advances is that editors can now lead the topic page with an ever-evolving news summary that can lay out the basics of a “topic” but be easily updated to reflect new stories as they’re added to the mix. In addition, the topic page toolkit allows the site to display a unique masthead image for each topic page, as well as a unique blogroll. And, as a nice bonus, that unique masthead and blogroll show up not just in the main topic index page, but also on any story that’s associated with the topic.
This kind of approach could be great for hyperlocal sites that are looking to create topic verticals for their community. Here’s a recent example of a topic page on California’s education budget crisis by Oakland North, a hyperlocal news project managed by the journalism school at the University of California, Berkeley, where KDMC folks are based. The page combines news stories with background time lines, maps, multimedia and charts.
KDMC developed the topic tool kit in late 2009 to help spread the word to its multimedia trainees about the benefits of the topic sections. I was able to test out the tools during a recent Web 2.0 training at the center, so I can attest to its ease of use and functionality — it took me just a few minutes to build a simple demo topics page.
Here’s an online tutorial to help create a topic site based on the Cutline theme, although it can be used with other WordPress themes. The tutorial, “Building a Topics System,” covers required plugins, and, if you’re familiar with PHP, there’s an additional tutorial on “Theme Modifications.”
KDMC is continuing to refine its topics tools — for instance it’s looking into integrating an ad system into the toolkit and is already thinking about how it might be adapted to publishing platforms like the iPad — so keep an eye out for improvements.
Note: A version of this post appeared previously on the Poynter.org web site’s E-Media Tidbits column, where Glenn is a contributor.
