Persistent News Stories

A while back I was listening to Matt Galligan talk about Circa on This Week in Startups. One of the main things I took away from it was their (to my knowledge, novel) technique of persisting their news stories over time.

When new information surfaces regarding one of their stories, they simply revise the existing article to reflect the new development, instead of publishing an entirely new article containing a combination of the old and new information.

This obviously reduces a lot of wasted effort in terms of rehashing duplicate information between stories. It’s also easier for the reader to come back to the same story and only look at the updates, ignoring the part they’ve already read.

I think this is a great feature of their product and company, and a reminder that one should always consider reusing existing work product wherever possible. In many cases, the end product is even better than when starting from scratch.