Explaining Storyline vs. the Washington Post biz section

Ryan McCarthy, the assistant business editor of the Washington Post, writes about how the paper’s Storyline website will be different than the paper.

McCarthy writes, “So rather than covering, say, health care — a topic so broad that it includes Obamacare, economics, the business of health care and wellness — we’ll be focusing on questions like ‘How is the Affordable Care Act changing us?’ Often, we’ll write a series of stories — chapters in a larger narrative — on those topics. We’re calling these complicated, multilayered questions ‘storylines.’

“You’ll find our main storyline of the day in the top of our homepage — those splashy top four stories you see. But when you open one of our other articles, you’ve opened a bit more than a page. We’ve taken you directly into a storyline. Scroll down and you’ll find more stories and more windows into the big questions we’re investigating.

“Each day we’ll publish in clusters around one or more storylines, which means any time you click into a relatively new piece of Storyline content, you’ll find yourself surrounded by our other coverage on that topic.

“Traditional news sites are really good at sending readers to one piece of content, but they’re largely bad at connecting readers with deep, multilayered information on what they care about. Part of this is a taxonomy problem: Why send readers to a business section rather than something more specific and personal? We want our storylines to be the polar opposite of a topic page; they’ll be conversational, direct and diverse streams of good stuff. We hope that you’ll come back to these storylines to see how they progress.”

Read more here.