Fabio Venneri is founder of unfolded.news, a project that experiments with dynamic content architectures to move beyond the atomization of articles and rebuild hierarchy, context, and narrative continuity in news.
The web atomized the news into endless feeds of isolated articles, built for clicks, not for trust. In the process, it lost the hierarchy and context that once gave journalism its depth. unfolded.news is a thin editorial layer that introduces a dynamic content architecture: connecting articles into storylines, restoring hierarchy and differentiation, and helping readers make sense of the news.
I’ve always been kind of a content-organization nerd, writing lists, building indexes, organizing archives, connecting things. When I was 13, I built my first website to put together all the existing knowledge about Dragon Ball, in an encyclopedic effort that took a whole summer, and opened the way for me to start building things on the internet.
Some years later, as a Product Manager for digital products, I kept working on content organization in the media, education and publishing industry, and finally in the news industry I love. And what I’ve noticed again and again is how very little thought goes into developing digital products that can really make a difference in how they’re built, rather than what they contain: in fact, focus has always been on the content itself.
As a product person, I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, and I finally had the chance to build the solution myself: unfolded.news is a light editorial layer that redefines a news site’s content architecture, helping readers follow stories as they evolve over time, giving more space to context and making better use of the digital archive.
But let’s begin at the beginning.
Online news and the atomization of content
Everyone knows what a newspaper looks like. As a product, it’s pretty straightforward, basically it’s just folded sheets of paper with text on each page. Nonetheless, in its simplicity, it is a very powerful design, and its value comes from the very fact that it is limited, from its boundaries. It forces journalists to make lots of decisions, and in those decisions is where the journalistic, informative value lies. So, besides the very content of the articles, also the way they are arranged together, the amount of space given to this or that, what goes on the front page and what on page 32, it all add context and additional levels of information.
News websites have long thought they could avoid making these decisions, because the container was no longer forcing them to. Space has become infinite, time unconstrained, so everything can be published, at any moment. Recency is almost the only criterion for organizing a homepage.
But it’s also true that basically no one even sees the homepage anymore, and it’s actually easy to draw a line between the homepage’s declining relevance and years of chasing low-quality traffic from social media and search engines: news sites optimized for direct traffic to individual articles, embracing an “atomization” of content where each piece lives largely on its own – and where there’s very little value in the way they are (not) pieced together.
The digital era’s early years were defined by the quest for volume, and with volume advertisement revenue, and with that the long-chased economic sustainability of a news business. Publishers have focused for years on driving traffic, only to find their business models constantly threatened by minor changes to Facebook’s newsfeed or Google’s search algorithm. At the same time, they culpably gave up on developing their owned media, where they are in control and where people are actually looking for value.
All chickens came home to roost when they started thinking about how to monetize their content with paywalls and subscriptions: they found out that everything they had done to be read (= to grow page views) was the exact opposite of what they should have been doing to get paid (= to get people to trust them and pay for their content). (Of course there are a few notable exceptions.)
This quantitative approach, as said, brought to what I called the atomization of content. If we were to imagine a news website in the physical world, I could think of a ream of A4 papers with an article printed on each of them. Not very practical, is it?
From print to digital: lost in translation
I was there when the first newspapers launched their online versions, and I’ve worked in the industry ever since. What I’ve seen is very little thinking about the product itself, about digital’s unique capabilities and how to leverage them.
Think about this, most news websites have been running on WordPress, which at its very core is a blogging platform, a journaling platform. Its main organization is chronological sorting. And this logic was inherited by all the organizations that built on top of it. They chose the tool (for lack of better alternatives or knowledge), and the tool dictated how they were built. And it still looks like that’s the case today, even though news websites no longer literally run on WordPress, since most have developed their own CMSs. Because of this decision, we’ve been treating news sites as feeds of posts, not as products designed to make sense of the world.
Another factor shaping these early years of digital news products is that with a lot of data came the illusion of control. And so everything shifted towards micro-optimization. Journalists became obsessed with reach, and with what to do to get it.
This struck me hard when I first read it:
“Among the first “old” media executives to awaken to the threat was Mel Karmazin, then the CEO of Viacom. He visited Google in 2003 and remembers how Page and Brin extolled the value of being able to measure everything, including the effectiveness of advertising.
This alarmed Karmazin, for it threatened how he sold advertising, which was based on salesmanship, emotion. Karmazin and the networks continued to charge steep rates because, Karmazin says, “advertisers don’t know what works and what doesn’t. That’s a great model.”
But it’s a model, the Google executives told him, that is horribly inefficient.
Karmazin, before departing, trained his eyes on his Google hosts and blurted, only half in jest, “You’re fucking with the magic!”
(Excerpted from Googled by Ken Auletta.)
We are fucking with the magic. Back in the days, we didn’t know what worked or not, and a newspaper had value as a complete product, not just in the single articles printed on it. The way each edition was packaged was not tied to immediate metrics of reach or views, but to the responsibility of delivering information, providing context, and helping readers understand the world. Movements in reach and distribution were slower, on a longer timeline, so adjustments were more thoughtful.
Now we see individual article performance dictating editorial decisions, trying to replicate what worked, avoid what didn’t. But most of the time no formula could ever be found or replicated. I remember my previous organization obsessing over push notification open rates, but you know what? Most of the time it was COMPLETELY RANDOM. Yet we made decisions based on this instead of focusing on how to explain the world so readers can make informed decisions about their lives.
unfolded.news: from atoms to molecules
I said I’ve seen very little thinking about products, about how to leverage what digital can do. What I’ve seen instead is just a move to bring content online, as if that were enough.
But digital actually enables us to do things differently, and to do entirely new things. It allows newsrooms to approach news in completely new ways. If we were to redesign a news website from scratch in 2025, it will look a bit different from what we are used to.
And that’s what I’m trying to do with unfolded.news: rethinking the container, redesigning the “news website” product to open up new possibilities for doing journalism well.
This is not just a nice-to-have. This is absolutely necessary, as we move towards a zero-click search future in which publisher’s content will be exploited by AI agents. Content alone is no longer enough.
As the name suggests, unfolded.news is about covering news stories as they unfold, shifting the focus from individual articles (the here and now) to the longer narrative they belong to. Covering “the climate, not the weather” they used to say.
At its core are two principles:
- Old news is good news. The peculiarity of digital is the ability to create dynamic relations between content pieces: this makes it possible to recreate every time the whole context around any piece of information, leveraging a living, more complex content architecture, and to turn the archive into a strategy rather than into a graveyard.
- Hierarchy and differentiation. Print excelled at this, but it got lost in translation: in newspapers and magazines, you would find different font sizes, sideboxes, and a wide variety of templates. Some articles will have a callout on the front page; others will get a few lines on page 32; others will deserve a double spread. Online, everything is the same, same style, same importance, same space taken. Every new article being published makes it to the homepage.
Working on these two aspects is the starting point for building better digital news products.
But the foundation is always the same. I always go back to Jeff Jarvis’ definition of journalism:
“Convening communities into civil, informed, and productive conversation, reducing polarization and building trust through helping citizens find common ground in facts and understanding.”
unfolded.news is built upon understanding. But there’s another word I care about: transparency. As Jeff Jarvis (again!) once paraphrased David Weinberger: transparency is the new objectivity. Because I don’t believe in objectivity either. Not in journalism. Not even in photography! Photography realized five minutes after its invention that it wasn’t capturing reality nor truth, it was making decisions: cropping, exposure, color, framing, contrast, light manipulation, staging. Journalism does the same. It’s not “just telling what happened.” It’s structuring information. It’s about depth, hierarchy, contrast, vividness.
So when I say “transparency,” I mean transparent reporting, the ability for readers to see how you’ve covered a story over time, what you got right, what you missed, how things evolved. It’s about context over content.
And that leads us to the real shift: moving from a system where everything revolves around the article, to one where the article is just one piece in a larger narrative. From atoms to molecules.
unfolded.news is a light editorial layer that builds dynamic content architecture on your site. It connects articles into storylines, giving readers context and publishers stronger engagement—and integrates easily with your CMS and workflows.
On a design level, unfolded.news is built on 3 main components:
- The homepage organizes content by storylines, highlighting latest news surrounded by contextual articles
- The storyline page uses a timeline structure showing differentiation between article types and visualizing coverage density over time
- The article page places each piece in temporal context, enriched with contextual information
My bet here is that without changing your current editorial output, and just working downstream of your usual workflows, I can repackage your content in a more engaging, informative experience.
Let’s collaborate. This can be tested with minimal effort – no disruption to your workflows, no risk to your Google Discover traffic. For demos, I’ve used live content from existing publishers (maybe yours too).
I’d love to show you more. Reach out to get an invite to unfolded.news and let’s talk.
