Last week, I explored the notion that digital media - and games in particular - might provide an opportunity for journalists to publish news "fragments" - pieces of relevant information that would otherwise be left on the editing room floor.
Turns out, major newspapers have already been playing around with this idea.
The day before the election, The New York Times published a series of small op-ed pieces about the campaign. Light-hearted and short, these commentary pieces wouldn't work individually, on their own; they aren't full fledged articles. One piece, for example, reminisces about Obama's victory in Iowa. Another calls attention to John McCain's Viagra gaffe.
So how would one organize these pieces under the banner of one coherent feature?
The Times editors chose Trivial Pursuit.
The Trivial Pursuit theme frames each commentary piece as the answer to a quiz-styled question. "What medicine brought the Straight Talk Express to an end?" asks the lead-in to the Viagra gaffe piece.
In framing the op-eds this way, the editors literally turn the commentary into a kind of guessing game. Further embracing the Trivial Pursuit structure, the editors have tried to retrofit the pieces to the game's categories. Howard Wolfson's piece about the Clinton campaign's playlist is filed under Entertainment ("What did Celine Dion do to Hillary Clinton?"), while Paul Maslin's piece about the Iowa primary is assigned to Geography.
I use the verb "retrofit" because it's clear that these category mappings were forced onto the pieces after the fact. The Art & Literature op-ed, for example, points to how John Edwards' refusal to accept money from lobbyists ended up embarrassing the Clinton campaign; an interesting observation, but certainly not related to either art or literature.
Category awkwardness aside, the loose game format seems quite appropriate to the content, which itself feels rather playful.
Actually, in the case of Michael Kinsley's piece, the quiz-like structure does help emphasize the message. The question, filed under History, asks us: "When was the last American election with four white guys on the two major-party tickets?"
It turns out to be a kind of trick question. Upon reading the article, which posits that we may never again see an election with four white male candidates, we realize that "last" should be taken to mean "final" and not "previous." The op-ed isn't telling us about history as much as it's arguing that this election is making history.
Leave a comment