Newswise Blog

Friday, December 09, 2011

Related Stories

Newswise just introduced a new way for readers to interact with its content.  The “Related Stories” module in the right sidebar of each article helps users find other articles related to their interest.  Clicking on the “Channel” tab shows those stories in a channel related to the article. 

Articles are assigned to channels by Newswise staff.  The “Keyword” tab shows those stories found on a search of the Newswise archive of 100,000 articles from over 10 years based on keywords provided by the story contributor.  The “Source” tab shows stories from the contributing institution.

This display of related stories provides an expanded exploration of the ideas presented in the originating article.  For example, the first Channel story on 2011-12-7 (the selections vary with time, of course) for the article “Study Suggests Flexible Workplaces Promote Better Health Behavior and Well-Being”  was “Your Abusive Boss May Not be Good for Your Marriage”.

Both of these articles received considerable attention by the news media.  This linking of stories by content is designed to help reporters research and expand on the ideas within each story.  With both of these stories, for example,  we can explore the interest by the news media.

Searching Google News for “Flexible workplaces promote better health ‘Erin Kelly’” (quotes identify the search string but were not included in the search, except Erin Kelly was included within quotes) found 9 articles (one a false positive).  A Google search for the title in quotes (“Study Suggests Flexible Workplaces Promote Better Health Behavior and Well-Being” found “About 13,200 results” on 2011-12-7.  Google showed 124 of these.

The Google News search for “abusive boss marriage ‘Dawn Carlson’“ found 10 articles on 2011-12-7.

Earlier Newswise introduced the “Most Popular” stories module as a way to enhance user participation. Before that commenting and earlier sharing provided Newswise readers easy ways to increase their interaction with content.  User interaction with news is an important part of the changing paradigms in communications and the new journalism.

Newswise is committed to creating new and useful information management tools for our readers so that our content is more valuable, interesting and easy to access.