Joshua Benton of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard just coined a new term, ““Holovaty’s Law”, that I really like. Well, I believe he coined it because Google turns up no results for “Holovaty’s Law”.

The post linked as Holovaty’s Law, by the way, is a classic. If you haven’t read it and you’re interested in news and journalism at all, you need to.

Let me take the concept and run a little further with it. And thanks to Benton, the law already has it’s first corollary!

Theorem: Holovaty's (First) Law of Online News
Adding structure to information makes it more valuable
1st Corollary
Adding structure to comments generates interesting data

Thoughts? Refinements? Other corollaries?

It seems like there’s a dearth of math geeks interested in journalism. Searches for “law of online news”, “fundamental theorem of online news”, “fundamental theorem of online journalism”, and “law of online journalism” all turn up nothing.