The Tribune Company is about to sell its Michigan Ave building since its bleeding cash. They established a venture fund a few years ago but last I heard hadn't invested yet since they hadn't found anything worth an investment.
In an industry full of failing companies it's delightful to see one Titan try to stay relevant.
I really like the idea of Particles. I had a similar thought this past year about building a news MVP that simply consisted of atomic facts (no more than a sentence) with an attached probability and discussion. Kind of like those you see in the IPCC (international panel on climate change) reports, where they have their claim and degree of certainty.
We were getting there with the whole Wikidata initiative, but it's still in its primitive stages with respect to content being statically authored and updated (AFAIK). It would be very interesting to see where we go with GraphQL - I could see that becoming the dominant machine-to-machine protocol for Semantic Web 3.0. The whole idea of taking what are usually REST resources and turning them into hierarchical JSON documents which you can query very flexibly is immediately appealing.
If this Particle concept catches on like cards have in UI design, I'd expect Twitter to be the first to ride the wave.
[1] http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/05/the-leaked-new-york-times-i...
As for Twitter, I doubt they can do it either. Their "Moments" initiative shows how little they understand curation.
[1] http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/i...
[2] http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects...
[1]http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g...
Could you elaborate on this? Specifically, what do you think is the better alternative?
Newspapers don't print feeds, there's no room. But if you have the archive to hand, as a database, then you don't need to make a perfect article. You just need to add updates as they happen.
Event 1: Plane crashes 10 dead Event 2: 100 dead confirmed Event 3: Actually 99 dead
This leaves the original events as a record of what was reported at the time, but the reader can also see the update. This is important to readers because while information can be added to articles, it can also be taken out, to try to conform to a narrative. Wikipedia is particularly prone to this kind of selection bias dressed up as fact-checking.
In many case, fact checking is often a way to hide bias under a veneer of authority, by proclaiming a selected set of selection bias facts as "the fact-checked truth". You only need to follow the major fact checking sites for a short time to see this in action.
The question is how can you effectively present conflicting information. I believe the article format is biased from the outset, whereas a more data-driven approach leads to less bias.