Sometimes, when I read news.com.au, I feel like bashing my head on the desk.

While it might be Australia’s most visited news site, the word “news” too often feels like it deserves to be put in quotation marks.

At times, it seems little more than a reliable snapshot of the front page of Reddit 12 hours earlier.

A recent low was its lengthy treatise on how to do the washing up.

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So credit where it’s due. There’s a piece currently being teased from the home age which is a great example of populist, mission-to-explain journalism.

It’s an explainer piece that Anthony Sharwood wrote for the site on the Syrian civil war.

It follows classic BuzzFeed format – offering the basic background to the situation as a listicle (list article) in ten points.

Credibly sourced and accessibly written, it offers an entry point for readers who understand that something serious is going on, feel slightly embarrassed they don’t understand more, but don’t know where to begin.

It made me think of a presentation by US journalism academic Jay Rosen to the Walkley conference back in 2010. Rosen made the point that too often in reporting, far greater background knowledge of the reader by the writer is assumed than is the reality. What publishers need, he argued, is a model which offers entry points into a complex story for those who do not have a full understanding. Using the example of covering an election, he described it as “horse racing journalism”.

And this piece on Syria is a great example of contextual reporting. For starters, although it is promoted from the home page at the time of writing, it was actually posted a fortnight ago. I missed it at the time – others didn’t though; it’s been shared on Facebook nearly 10,000 times and on Twitter 300.

Despite not being fresh content, it still has a useful life alongside the latest update on diplomatic discussions around Syria.

And, as Rosen makes the point in his ABC interview with Leigh Sales above, once readers are caught up, they become much more likely to be a potential consumer of future updates.

Funnily enough, the formula – a list – also has more to it than meets the eye.

Another great presentation from the Walkley conference – at this year’s event, this time – is also relevant.

Jack Shephard, editorial director of BuzzFeed, made a brilliant case for why lists can be a respectable, logical journalistic tool.

In recent weeks, I’ve felt a bit depressed looking at a number of Australian news sites, not just News Corp’s news.com.au. As I say, too many articles consists of the formula of whatever’s just become popular on Reddit with the angle simply being that “it’s just gone viral”.

As I write, six articles further down from Sharwood’s piece on news.com.au, is another news story: “Passive-aggressive commuter gets owned on Reddit“. It was posted just before 11am today. I read it on Reddit just before I went to bed at 11pm last night. (The story doesn’t even link to the Reddit piece in question – curiously, it links to the Fairfax-affiliated Gawker instead.)

In the long term, or even medium term, regularly regurgitating Reddit is not going to work for sites. Reddit is rapidly going mainstream. Once readers discover Reddit, they have little reason to bother with sites that many consolidate populist content from elsewhere.

So the sites have to find other ways of adding real value.

This piece from Sharwood is a great example of that. More please.

Tim Burrowes