Web shells are just like those Russian "nesting" boxes. Story shells can live in issues shells, which can live in beat shells.

A beat shell organizes the data, resources, backgrounders and archives for traditionhal news beats, such as sports, business, local and state government, education, health and safety, transportation, etc.

		A story shell organizes data, resources, and backgrounders in a story package. News organizations usually run the stories as a series, adding a story and sidebars daily.

Examples of good beat shells include the Washington Post and New York Times business sites, CJOnline?s RockKansas.com, HawkZone and Kansas Legislature sites, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer?s Transportation site.

An issue shell organizes data, resources, backgrounders and archives around an issue that the news organization is likely to cover for a while. Many news organizations dabbled in issue shells before Sept. 11, but almost all embraced them after the terrorist attack generated so much news and information. Examples of issue shells relating to Sept. 11 are the Washington Post?s America at War the Los Angeles Times? Response to Terror, and the PBS News Hour?s The Response. Other issue shells include the Washington Post?s Corporate Ethics site, and TBO.com?s Hurricane WeatherCenter.

A story shell organizes data, resources, and backgrounders in a story package. News organizations usually run the stories as a series, adding a story and sidebars daily. Examples: Durham Herald-Sun?s Touching Hearts, the Magnolia Plantation story in the New York Times Race in America series, (click on "launch complete flash tour"), and the Everett (Washington) Herald Waterfront Renaissance site.

The mistake many news organizations make in story shells, once the story package is complete, is keeping a "day-one", "day-two", "day-three" structure that echoes the print version. If it's a chronological story, such as an expedition or days-in-the-life-of someone dying of cancer, then the stories should be presented by actual date. But if the story content isn't chronological, then it needs to be reorganized.

"For example," says Rob Curley, general manager of the Lawrence Journal-World's World Online,  "Lawrence had a big package on the Jayhawks trip to the Final Four. The top story on the site now is how many KU (University of Kansas) fans bought forged tickets. That's the last story they wrote. So, it's up at the top." A centerpiece story about forged tickets doesn't make sense to a reader who wants to revisit the story of a college basketball team going to the national championships. "Once it's time to start mothballing the site, an editor has to go in and add some news judgment," says Curley.

There's one more type of shell, says Hal Straus, database editor and manager at Washington Post.Newsweek Interactive -- the user shell. This comprises content and links to content that is based on user preferences that have been collected explicitly, in surveys or questionnaires, or implicitly, from tracking readers' use of the site. If, for example, a person spends 95 percent of his time on CJOnline's HawkZone site, then no matter where he goes elsewhere on the news site, says Straus, he should be only one click away from HawkZone.

Another example can be found on commercial Web sites such as Amazon.com. "When I see Amazon mining book sales transactional database to come up with most-popular lists, and display those to users based on what they ordered in the past, I see that as powerful thing that grabs people," says Straus. "They're grabbing people to buy another book. We're trying to grab people to pay attention to a really great Post series or to use a deep online database."

On to ... The Future