I am struggling to keep up with the news. There’s just so much of it. In long articles, too. All instantly accessible via the Web news sites, feeds and who knows what else. And I mean Instantly. And I mean All. Which means the choices of what goes on the “front page” must be almost impossible to make. For example, here are two headlines from the BBC news website from the front page: “Irish Republic ‘to get bailout’” and, about three inches away in the same color and font as the first (although a few point sizes smaller) “Speculation rife over Royal wedding venue”.

The challenge, I think, is that there are so many complex and important world news stories that it’s impossible to present updates on all of them every day and not be overcome by it all. If that is the challenge, then what’s the answer?

The key phrase is “updates on all of them every day.” At the moment I see the news being presented chronologically. Today’s loaf of news about big stories A, B and C (out of all 26 letters now available in voluminous volumes) with a handful of Royal wedding raisins thrown in followed by tomorrow’s, where, in fact, “tomorrow” has collapsed to next minute, will soon go to next second (see the continuously updating top line at the BBCs website) and will soon collapse to next twitter unit of time. Who has time to keep track of all the updates without missing entire stories?

For example on the 18 November 2010 at 16:15 the front page of the BBC News website did not contain an occurrence of the word “climate”. “Climate change” is actually a big story.

Reading the rest of this page doesn’t help. It scrolls down over five pages of my laptop screen and has links (in all the same color and font) for everything from “Can we learn to love ‘le pop’? to “Brain cancer ‘trojan attack’ hope” to “Boyle album is transatlantic hit” to a “Chinese woman jailed over tweet” and I would suggest that, over time and in the world, the news around human rights in China is more important than Susan Boyle‘s continued success (although I very pleased about that, just not expecting its news to be on the front page). Not to mention the analysis of all this news. Not to mention all the available languages.

It seems to me that I am being asked to manage the news stories over time. I have to connect the time dots and make sure I add the Chinese woman tweet story to, somehow, my internal (or computer assisted) databank around Chinese human rights (with the maintenance of my database of stories in general having to even suggest to me that this story is, in fact, about human rights at all, and that is the next challenge I see for news organizations; they have to handle it because I can’t keep track of it all. (I’m not going to talk about perceived slant in this post).

But in recognizing the challenge — how to keep up my database of stories and add the updates to each over time as I need to – I can see an answer and that is to use dynamic information mapping. I can see DIM as a (not necessarily “the”) future for news organization and organizations.

I started a DIM map for the Gulf Oil Spill using debategraph. I bent the service a bit to make it fit a news context but it’s simple enough to get across the idea. I started it as a citizen response to the spill — I’ve stopped updating it — and now it serves as an example for this use of DIM. Here’s the link to the Macro view: Gulf oil spill map, macro view (but you absolutely have to have Flash — the HTML version is not DIM at all) and see the last two posts for the advantages of DIM in general.

So now the story is presented in its entirety with a structure that can be manipulated to foreground and background elements as they become more or less important with entire chunks of story elements moved around with ease. The maps are multi-contributor and Cloud-based so they can be updated from anywhere.

Perhaps most importantly separate maps can be linked together at will. You’ll see that the GOS map connects upstream through an intermediate map to the Global Environment Map from which you can reach out to other environment sections and maps, such as a section and then maps on climate change, including links to climate change organizations (like 350.org) which are important parts of the story for their news but also for their demonstration of the effort that is, actually, now going into the whole area of climate change. All these maps can be created, updated and linked by separate groups of people.

I created this map by hand but I can see a near future for automatic updates.

This post only scratches the surface of the use of DIM in news but I hope it gives some idea of its potential.

updated: I should have mentioned that Debategraph maps have the potential to be connected to the Semantic web — opened up to or integrated with — and this is (or must be) a characteristic of all DIM maps. updated 11/19/10.