Facebook Advances the New Unit of Reporting?

The new Facebook stuff includes the concept of "social object," which is a fancy term meaning "something people want to talk about." (Yes, we could use a new term.)

A social object could be the focus of all the reporting, fact checking, and discussion around a topic.

Facebook apps could be used to vote up or down posts based on factchecking and perceived trustworthiness.

Apps could be used to raise the priority of a topic, so we don't forget big stories.

The deal is that a social object could be a living version of the whole story around a something.

The general observation has already been made, recently, when not long ago, Jeff Jarvis built on a deep observation from Marissa Mayer at Google, in Buzzmachine.

Abandoning thearticle for some living, breathing news beast yet to be defined may bea bit too radical for today's publishers. So instead, I suggest, atleast place the article into a space with broader context - archives,quotes, photos, links, discussion, wikified knowledge about the topic,feeds of updates; make the article a gateway to anything more you'dwant on its subjects. Daylife (where I'm a partner) is working on something like that.

The "short half life" of an article is why really the good reporting on
WMDs and the financial crisis disappeared before they could inform the
public. Failures of news curation like that not only hurt the country,
but
contribute to loss of trust in news media.

If you're looking at a topic, it could be easy to keep the topic alive.
We
might have noticed that something was really fishy re WMDs or the
suppression of financial regulation in the mid-2000's.