The Directory for Liquid Content is a scalable and modular taxonomy designed to map, describe, and standardize how digital news is structured, styled, and surfaced in the 21st century.
1. Clarity in Complexity: Digital news is told in countless ways — from scrollable timelines and data-rich explainers to auto-generated interfaces and immersive experiences. This taxonomy brings structure to that fragmentation, giving creators, researchers, and technologists a clear framework to describe and compare content.
2. Built for Modularity: Each piece of content — its type, format, features, and delivery channel — is treated as a modular unit. This makes it easier to assemble, adapt, or repurpose news stories across contexts, users, or platforms.
3. Made for Machines and Humans: This isn’t just a journalist-readable reference. It’s also a machine-usable system — designed to train models, inform agent workflows, and guide automation. It helps systems not just interpret the content of news, but understand the form in which it’s told.
4. A Common Language for the News Ecosystem: From newsroom editors to product managers, from AI researchers to UX designers — this taxonomy offers a shared vocabulary. It’s a starting point (and a conversation starter) for alignment, collaboration, and innovation across the entire digital news pipeline. Machines cannot navigate ambiguity the way humans can — and if we don’t codify the editorial concepts we understand intuitively, we risk leaving their interpretation to external systems that don’t share our values or context. Defining these terms ourselves ensures the logic of journalism is preserved and legible to both journalists and machines.
5. Future-Proof and Fluid: As formats evolve and interfaces shift, this system evolves too. It’s designed to scale as required, and support emerging formats, new modes of storytelling, and the increasing role of personalization and interactivity in news. In a fluid media landscape, this is a flexible foundation.
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ou can treat this system as a database, a dictionary, a modular design framework — or all three. At its core, The Directory for Liquid Content is a toolkit for anyone shaping how news is told, read, and experienced today and tomorrow.