My hunch is it isn't usually predictable which stories will have interesting developments in the future. A space mission and natural disaster are great examples but I wonder if they are the exception not the rule?

My favorite thing about Circa is their notecard approach to storytelling. It makes it so much more digestible. Though ill admit I don't find myself returning as often as I compliment their product design :)

The hope I have is that it might connect us to normally sensationalist stories in a more human way.

Following Sandy was most interesting not during the lead up or the storm itself, but months later as the lingering effects became more human, even though the event itself was out of site. Such a feature on a site like the NYT would allow you to follow stories after they leave the front page and are buried first pages back. Following stories that leave the spotlight could have a lower cost to readers.

Thanks @Drew for starting the conversation. @Josh Miller you'd actually be surprised how many stories are followed up. Right now our limitations in following up is more manpower and less because stories don't lend themselves to it. Whether it's the unexpected stories (Mante Te'o, Lance Armstrong, Aaron Swartz's Death, etc) or the obvious political dramas (Debt Ceiling) most stories that are covered by the media end up bubbling up again and again over a period of time - eventually being "put to rest" but never on their first "breaking" day. The obvious types of stories that don't lend themselves to being followed up ever (or rarely) are scientific studies, obituaries (obviously) and a few (the exception) others.

I do definitely get annoyed when I read an article that is 80% old news and 20% new! What are your top ten most followed stories so far? Or what types of stories tend to get the most followers?

@Josh Miller - agreed. That is precisely one of the problems we want to solve. Without getting into specifics - the types of stories that people seem to like following are....

1. Tech/Science (As @Drew mentioned - we have a story about Mars Curiosity's adventures and people love it).
2. National moments: Hurricane Sandy, Sandy Hook, Aurora Shooting,
3. Political Moments: Fiscal Cliff, many of those followers are now shifting to the debt debate.
4. Court Cases: From the Supreme Court down to local cases like George Zimmerman. Examples of highly followed ones would be the Cannibal NY Cop and the Nanny who killed those kids and the Supreme Court taking up Gay Marriage.

That's just off the top of my head - but hopefully gives an example.

Have you considered a more topic-based follow model? "Follow all the Lindsay Lohan gossip!" Obviously, not an example you want to write to your journalism about but could be successful given that folks like the "Cannibal NY Cop" case, etc.

I'm sure you know first-hand Josh when working at a startup there is no shortage of features we have considered. I think the relationship between Cannibal Cop and Lohan, however, wouldn't be the connection we'd make. Instead rather if following that court case you might be more interested in a court case about suspected terrorists, Bradley Manning, etc.

Definitely can sympathize. We still haven't built quick edit and it bites me every time.

Also, admire the editorial approach you guys are taking, and I'm glad that you you put Lohan after Manning.

Any other surprises so far? Are your users obsessed with something you originally didn't think was a big deal? Or from an editorial perspective what's been the toughest part so far?

(only ask because at branch we've learned the most from our mistakes and what the users have shown us.)

@Josh in terms of surprises: Funny enough space has been a surprise. When I think about it - it seems like a forehead slapping obviously popular story to follow - but space stories have done particularly better than I would have expected.

Hardest part: Without going too deep into it - I like to think more and more that our challenge on the editorial side is to "model the world" or create a kind of model of the issues that we care about (and think our readers care about). We don't write articles - we take what's happening and create story threads that model what is happening over a period of time. It's an interesting exercise.

@David, you should take a look at Daylife's subject based API work if you haven't already. It allows for querying based on topics, people, places, and more. I think there's an opportunity to take subjects with long shelf lives which are undervalued as a single news instance and own them--not surprised science fits this niche.

But another good science example that works better as an alert/feed than as one big story: there's an astronaut running a Tumblr from space: colchrishadfield.tumblr.com

I'm addicted to his photography, so much so that I've even been following some of the experiments he's been helping conduct. I fully consider myself a space nerd, but thanks to the steady drip of posts his is the first reentry I'll actually seek out in awhile.

If I might chime in here, about the follow-model specifically. One thing that has been unique to Circa since the beginning is our technology, because we built it specifically to support things like the follow feature. It's because we build stories in a structured format that we're able to support a feature like this. Traditional news is still written in unstructured formats that largely couldn't work with this "living story" model because it would turn into a Word-like "Track Changes" mess. That's largely why I believe it hasn't been done to date.

As a user of Circa, I've found that I've followed more stories than I would have thought going into it. Beyond that, I'm following stories that with traditional news, I would have really cared less about. But because following allows me to see how something develops, it becomes more interesting to me.

Case in point being the General Petraeus story. I would have seen all the headlines and gotten annoyed quite quickly. But the way that Circa pares down to facts, and makes it dead simple to stay in touch, makes the story far more interesting to me.

It's a feature that I hope we're able to truly show users the value. It'll just take some work :)

> "Traditional news is still written in unstructured formats."

Why do you think this is the case? When the NYT's Snow Fall story came out, I remember thinking that I'd love to give them my email to subscribe to subsequent "chapters" of the story. That's a little different than what you're doing at Circa (adapting subscription to breaking news), but you'd think that thinking creatively about subscriptions would already be in publishers' wheelhouse...

Newspapers stories remain unstructured because the bulk of the income still comes from print advertising and circulation. To start structuring and managing subscriptions to specific beats you'd be ignoring the print side of the business entirely, disrupting yourself.

To my mind, there's no question this is the sustainable path, but it requires a bit of bravery. The Atlantic has a done a good job of late striving to disrupt themselves rather than wait for others to do so.

Do you think papers like The New York Times are in some sense to big to adapt? Acting like the Atlantic and disrupting their bread and butter might not be feasible (or too difficult to swallow) given the size of their staff and infrastructure.