News must be really hard to follow for an everyday consumer of a newspaper website. First tweets go out, sometimes with no links to additional coverage. Then a few grafs go up on a blog, followed by additional updates, either to the top of that post or as new posts. Eventually, a print story gets started, which is posted through an entirely different workflow onto a different-looking story page. This version is usually written as an hourglass-style narrative, following typical print conventions. For the rest of the day, new updates start going to this story rather than the original blog post. Having a hard time following? Here’s a graphic to help:

As a reader, this is confusing because:

1. I don’t know where to start or end
2. When I jump into the story somewhere in the middle gray area, I don’t know where to go to get previous coverage or the full picture
3. To continue following the story, I don’t know where to look
4. When I look at all this content as a whole, I don’t know where the newest information is. Read more

Among the bevy of online news sites, mobile applications, and hyperlocal mashup aggregators, it can be pretty confusing to determine the context of all these tools. Nieman Journalism Lab’s exciting new project seeks to pull these tools together into a resource they call Encyclo.

Think of Encyclo as a wiki-style compilation of the publications and businesses which are driving the evolution of journalism. There are newspapers, magazines, broadcast news organizations, wire services, tech companies, and much more. There are currently over 200 sources in Encyclo, and each entry page includes key links to the organization’s website or social media presences, a few paragraphs describing the organization, and an aggregation of coverage from Nieman Lab and from around the web via Mediagazer.

Users can share entry pages via Facebook or Twitter, and mark them for later consumption using Instapaper. Since this is a new project from Nieman Journalism Lab, users are welcome to contribute to the site and add new entries for their organizations, and give up dates on current entries. Aside from being a great tool for discovering what news organizations are making waves online. While the service has only been online for a few weeks, some are seeing it as a great resource to use for journalism classes.

Visit Encyclo today at http://niemanlab.org/encyclo.