One strategy for news organizations to compete in an environment in which narrow-interest competitors abound is to re-organize the content on their websites into topical "shells," which are sometimes referred to as "verticals."

Instead of trying to lure people to a home page with a variety of general interest news stories, sections of a news site are built out with deep content in each to serve the more particular interests of people within the publication's broader audience.

A shell will feature not just news stories, but other kinds of information about a topic to give people a sense of context and continuity on the subject. Thus a topical shell will include a lot of "evergreen" content such as background information and searchable databases, as well a strong online community component so people with common interests have a place to gather online and discuss those interests.

Examples of shells:

• BBC News' Special Reports on areas of continuing, in-depth news coverage by the BBC. These are topical shells with extensive background information.
• The Seattle Post Intelligencer's Transportation section. (which continues even as the Post Intelligencer has discontinued its print product) In this section of the website you'll find live webcams of traffic conditions, traffic incident reports and links to other information on traffic and transit, as well as news stories.
• The New York Times' Real Estate section that has multimedia stories, community guides and searchable databases on housing prices and building permits. See the Times' Auto section for similar features.
• The New York Times also has started Times Topics which uses a similar approach with many other news topics.
• The Chicago Tribune has created hundreds of topics pages, although they only aggregate articles from the paper (see also this Nieman Journalism Lab story on how the topics pages are driving Google search traffic to the site).
• The Associate Press is considering creating topical “news guide landing pages.” See the Nieman Journalism Lab posting about an AP memo on this plan.
• Salon.com is similarly focusing its site on deep, rich article and topics pages.
• Hearst Entertainment launched LMK.com, a topically organized site. See the PaidContent.org story on it.

Here's what Martin Nisenholtz, senior vice president of digital operations at the Times, had to say about the Times Topics sections:

"..we are now grouping many of our articles in things we call 'Times Topics' (see the tab at the top of nytimes.com home.) This introduces a new taxonomy to our site, one that is based on persistent topics with links to resources under those topics, rather than the traditional section and article structure. This makes it much easier for our content to be found in search, as the engines can look at a single URL for any given topic.

"The development of our Topic architecture is a critical one for NYTimes.com"

See also the testimony (pdf file) of Marissa Mayer, Google Vice President, at the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, on May 6. 2009, in which she discusses the "atomic unit of consumption" of news and praises the New York Times' Topics approach.

Mayer argues that news organizations need to focus on developing topical web pages that are "a consistent reference point that gains clout and a following of users over time," and where an "evolving story (is) published under a permanent, single URL as a living, changing, updating entity" with "obvious and engaging next steps for users."

Salon.com is taking this approach at its site. At a UC Berkeley Media Technology Summit in September 2009, Salon Chief Executive Officer Richard Gingras said "'the core of the matrix'" for news outlets in making transactions is no longer an entire website but individual stories. Because at least half of the audience on most websites arrives there after an Internet search, stories become much more attractive when they are enriched with articles, graphics, reader discussion and the like, Gingras said." (this summary of Gingras' remarks was in a Los Angeles Times story about the conference by James Rainey)

Also look at the approach taken by the hugely popular wikipedia, which embeds breaking news in the context and background for the topic that's in the news.

Young people in particular are interested in background information on a topic, especially if it's well organized, uncluttered and accompanied by visual elements like photos and graphics. See the Northwestern University Media Management Center study on "Teens Know What They Want From Online News: Do You?"

Readings and Resources

The ‘hyperinterest’ approach to online news - Save the Media blog, blending niche and hyper-local content

More details on the ‘hyperinterest’ approach - Save the Media blog

Of Living URLs, Newspaper Rankings & California Fires - Search Engine Land article that explores Google's Marissa Mayer's recommendations for topics pages and for assigning permanent "living URLs" to stories, and points out the limitations Google's own Google News poses for such approaches to story organization.