Since they’re unlikely to report on the mechanics of some of their own website and journalistic output, I’ll take a moment to highlight it on their behalf.
Reading pages or Linkblogs
Traditionally known as linkblogs back in the old blogosphere days, this sort of web pattern is probably better and more specifically called a “reading page” now. (Even Nieman titles the page “What We’re Reading” and uses /reading/ in the URL path to the page itself.) Many people still maintain linkblogs or bookmark pages (often on social silos like Pinboard, Pinterest, Twitter, Pocket, Instapaper, et al.), but generally the semantic name there implies articles or pages that were found to be of general interest or that one wanted to keep to read or consume later. On today’s more advanced web, there’s actually more value in naming it a reading page as it indicates a more proactive interest in the bookmarked content–namely having spent the time, effort, and energy to have actually read the thing being bookmarked. This additional indication of having more skin in the game provides a lot of additional value of a read post over a simpler bookmark post in my mind. It’s also part of the reason my website sends and receives read-specific webmentions.
This pattern of providing links of read material is pretty cool for a variety of reasons.
Discovery
First, if you’re following and reading the Nieman Lab, you’re very likely going to be interested in many of the things that they’re reading, researching, and covering. By providing a reading page they’re giving their readers a trove of useful data to discover articles and material in similar and tangential spaces that the lab may not be able to actively cover or engage in at the time.
Context
By knowing what the Lab is reading, you’re provided with a broader perspective of the things they’re actively interested in. By reading those things yourself, you’ll have increased context into what they’re doing, what those areas look like, and what they are adding to the conversation in their research and work.
Added value to their site
Linkblogging has long been a thing, and, in part, is what a large number of Twitter users are typically doing. In Nieman Lab’s case, they’re just doing it on their own website, which adds tremendous value to it. By smartly hosting it on their own site they’re also guarding against the built value of their read archive disappearing if they were hosted on a social silo (remember Delicious? CiteULike?). Also by keeping it on their site, it has more long-tail value than if it were to all disappear into the new-content-wins attention machine that Twitter has become.
Of course I’d personally find it a lot more beneficial if they provided or advertised a linkblog feed for their reading page. Sadly they don’t. However, if you’re as interested as I am, you’ll dig under the hood a bit to discover that Nieman Lab’s site is built on WordPress and they’re using that page likely with a category, tag, or other taxonomy. So with a short bit of intuitive guessing about how WordPress is structured, we happily discover there is a feed of their reads at https://www.niemanlab.org/reading/feed/. (I suspect this feed exists as a design choice by WordPress than by the design or will of the Nieman Lab.) If you prefer a faster, one button subscribe option:
If Nieman would like their own universal follow button like this, take a peek at what SubToMe has to offer on this front.
Value to research
By accumulating a trove of links and summaries, which they’re hopefully keeping, they’re creating a huge relevant database for future research on the topics in which they have interest. The small pieces that may not make sense today may potentially be woven into future narratives and pieces of research later, but this sort of thing is vastly harder to do without reading and making note of it. In a sense, they’re creating a corporate or research lab-based commonplace book for their own use.
Other Examples
While I’ve seen many people (generally individuals and not magazines, companies, or other bigger outlets) regularly publish newsletters or weekly posts on what they’ve found on the web that is interesting, I haven’t seen as many who publish specific pages or archives of what they’re reading. Even fewer provide RSS or other feeds of this content.
The IndieWeb wiki read page has some useful and interesting examples of this behavior, but they’re almost all individuals.
One other example I can think of in the journalism space, mostly because it’s getting to that end-of-the-year recap time is Bloomberg’s Jealousy List, which this year incidentally has some fun little drolleries that move as you scroll the page. This subset of reading lists is interesting as a group of articles Bloomberg wished they’d written and published themselves. This may indicate that they’re keeping a reading list internally, but just not publishing it regularly like Nieman is.
I can’t help thinking if Nieman Lab’s OpenFuego bot is a part of their workflow in creating their reading page as well?
And finally, since I also have a similar behavior, I’ll mention that you can find my reads on my reading page (sometimes with commentary) or follow it all via RSS if you like.
Are you aware of other people or organizations publishing lists of what they’re actively reading online? Do they provide feeds? How can we make this feature more prevalent on the open web?
Followed What We’re Reading | Nieman Journalism Lab (Nieman Lab)
Some additional ideas concerning this follow.
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The Nieman Lab has an awesome and invaluable “Reading Page”
The Nieman Lab has an awesome and invaluable “Reading Page”
@c Added to my RSS feed! One piece of feedback: the large screenshot confused mr at first, because I wondered if I was alread reading the Nieman page
@macgenie Thanks for the note. I had the same issue myself, especially on my desktop browser. It looked better on mobile. I reduced the resolution a bit to make it appear more like a screenshot, but I’m still debating moving it into the body to make it look more like an example.
Like many I joined WikiTribune, the new social network for news. The service quickly overtook Aacademia.edu as the primary spam engine of my inbox.Got me thinking that Nuzzel, an app that algorithimically surfaces stuff to read by what your followers share on Twitter, already adds a layer of trust. I don’t know the 1,000s of people I follow but I know I felt their work deserved the h/t of a follow.I have also used Twitter lists, not my own who has time for that, but those made by other people. People I trust.Still both of these services rely on a third party silo that monetizes and gets value from my trusted network. So this got me thinking about an #IndieWeb Version.Curating Read PostsChris Aldrich recently explored the possibilities and demonstrated how folks can follow interesting things he reads using RSS. Not so much a community effort.For #clmooc, a community that grew out of a MOOC run by the National Writing Project on Connected Learning, we utilize a web ring. I then made a Public RSS feed using inoreader. Most people in the community blog enough to tag their posts which I use for specific feeds or they have blogs dedicated to just the clmooc community. Have mroe community but still requires one to visit the sie and subscribe to the feeds.Curating TrustWikiTribune set out to create a collective community of trusted news. From an #IndieWeb perspective trust begins with your own domain. I fully believe people will not spray paint their own front door with bullshit the way we do on social media.I also believe the use of web rings as an indircator of trust and membership can also provide indicators of credibility.I spend a lot of time looking at metadata, trust, claims, and evidence….but I always return to people. Trust begins and ends with people.How Could an IndieWeb “What to Read” Tool Work?Chris’s post and my recent experience with WikiTribune got me thinking about an IndieWeb version. The presmise would have to be publishing what you read or is worthwile reading from your own site. Some folks may use a bookmark, like, or even experimental post types such as a “read” post.You would then opt-in to “what to read” using your domain. Then you would be asked to enter the url to your feed. Microcast.club work like this already.All of your posts in the feed would be parsed and then added to a firehose chronological feed. There would also be one generated using th frequency of links and webmentions. So if an article gets shared by n+1 people it gets a bump, if a post getsd a webmention it gets a bump. The feed could then refresh at specific times of the days.We could also use tags and p-categories to help with topic discovery.I guess there could be email notifications. I would be fine without them as I would subscribe to “What to Read” in my social reader.Featured Image: READ flickr photo by adamsaul shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license ;Also on IndieNews
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Hi. Thanks for the post. Does anyone know what plugin is made with what we’re reading? In the source code I see two that can be: CurateWP and Argos Link but I couldn’t figure it out
Lewis, thanks for asking. I’d meant to dig into this very question myself and had found the same two plugins hiding in the source that you had. Argo links looks like an older project that may not be maintained anymore while the newer CurateWP is a paid plugin.
I’ll ping them and see what sort of response we get about how they’re collecting and presenting them. My reading page is built using David Shanske‘s excellent Post Kinds plugin. I suspect if Nieman is paying a larger fee, they may prefer to do a custom template for a reading page and use something for free.
While I’m thinking about it David may appreciate the structure and functionality of these as I know he’s been thinking about something to replace bookmark related functionality, though I think he has something much more comprehensive in mind.
Argo:
* https://github.com/argoproject/argo-links
* http://argoproject.org/argo-links.php.html
* https://argo-links.readthedocs.io/en/develop/
CurateWP: https://curatewp.com/
Great sleuthing! I am the creator of CurateWP and just saw this thread. Although Nieman Lab is using CurateWP on the website, it’s not currently being used to create this page.
I saw within the code references to “wwr-” and through my own searching I could not find a related plugin. It could be a custom plugin they created for themselves.
Regardless, I appreciate the mention! Reading how valuable this kind of page is fuels ideas that I can bring into CurateWP. I’m currently working on a new major release that focuses on the new block editor.
@NiemanLab A few of us are curious what your site uses to build its “Reading Page”?
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Could you find out what plugin the What we’re reading section is made with? I’m very interested