Slate Magazine’s Slatest blog introduces a new way of visualising stories: ‘News Dots’ presents the most recent topics in the news as a giant social network.
“Subjects – represented by the circles below – are connected to one another if they appear together in at least two stories, and the size of the dot is proportional to the total number of times the subject is mentioned.”
Slate is replacing the 12 year old ‘Today’s Papers’ feature – what the NYTimes calls ‘one of the original aggregators of the web’ – with a thrice daily summary.
The NYTimes reports:
“In its place comes a new recap of the news, one that acknowledges that the news cycle has, well, sped up quite considerably since ‘Today’s Papers’ started in 1997. That is why the ‘Slatest,’ the name of the new feature that comes online Monday morning, will collect the world’s news three times a day.”