Newsless.org

I’ve written a lot here about evolving journalism to enable it to tell larger stories. But how on earth do we tell the story of a year like this? This is a question I have no answer for.

The dominant story today is of course a narrative about race in America. A black man has been elected to lead a nation where just 40 years ago, you could be murdered for registering blacks to vote. It would be difficult enough to do justice to that story.

But race is only a segment of a deeply complex fractal of stories that emerged this year. And I find the greatest human pathos of the story of 2008 in the folds of that fractal, where the stories of race, class, sex, sexuality, gender, and generations intersect. If you’d frozen any moment of this year and traced the connections between the characters and incidents splashed on every front page, you’d have the setting for a drama as engrossing as any set to page or screen this year:

• Jeremiah Wright and Hillary Clinton, each seemingly convinced that America is not ready for a black President, both seem to try all they can to prove that conviction right.
• As Bill Clinton struggles to uplift his wife to office and thereby grasp some glimmer of redemption, John Edwards and Elliot Spitzer each re-enact his stunning fall from grace.
• John McCain, whose immense estate has brought him unending pressure in a populist year, pins his hopes on a working-class Everyman and an accomplished PTA mom from Alaska.
• As voters in California elect Barack Obama, who was born to a marriage which was then illegal in some states, they also amend their state constitution to prevent gays and lesbians from getting married.
• Chicago in 2008 finds itself caricatured as a den of anarchists and terrorists, summoning the ghosts of 40 years prior.
  

Even the minor characters in these dramas could have come straight out of Shakespeare’s head. People like Patty Solis-Doyle, Ashley Todd, Todd Palin, Bill Ayers, and Elizabeth Edwards all emerge from the year with fascinating stories to tell.

It feels important to me that these intersecting stories be told. I think 2008 has quite a lot to teach us. But I have no idea what shape that story could take.

All that said, though, I think the story’s power lies in the links. And I imagine the answer to my question will involve the link as well.

This isn’t really about context or journalism. I spent a couple hours after Obama’s victory speech grabbing full screenshots of a bunch of websites. My little piece of history.

I got a good question last week from a grad student here at Mizzou. I thought the question and my response were worth sharing. First, the question:

I had an interesting interview with a Chemistry professor this morning.  … He thinks the Missourian, and media in general, don’t write enough stories about science.  As a Chemistry professor, he thinks the general public should hear more about the work that he does and the importance of it.  On the other hand, you can’t write a headline that says “Chemistry professor will cure cancer” since it’s not necessarily true.  He’s certainly not a fan of media “hype.”  Would producing a context-rich website include writing stories about topics we don’t usually cover, like the confusing world of chemistry, or would it simply be aimed at giving more context to the subjects we often cover?  Is “context” topic-specific, or are you looking to broaden the wide world of information that readers have access to?

My reply:

I think journalists’ inability and unwillingness to cover science properly is a huge blind spot to the profession, caused by a couple of systemic incompatibilities between the science world and journalism as it’s practiced.

I would also say that not enough science coverage is a big problem, but woefully inaccurate science coverage might be an even bigger problem. Many journalists covering science aren’t thoroughly steeped in the sciences. Even at papers like the NY Times, which might do more science coverage than any other general-interest periodical in the country, the science reporters are usually dilettantes, not specialists. I don’t think my research would do much to help that problem, except to the extent that I’m advocating for the greater involvement of non-journalists (including scientists) in journalism.

And yes, I think focusing journalism more squarely on context would help overcome the problems, although the lack of context is only part of the issue. Journalism today is built around news events – that is, discrete, high-profile occurrences. Science is essentially built around the opposite of news events – the slow, steady, procedural accumulation and refinement of knowledge.

Even still, we miss opportunities to tie science information in when news events warrant it. For example, until recently, Sarah Palin’s stump speech contained a dig about how the government wastes money on such nonsense as researching the DNA of fruit flies. Scientists howled in fury – fruit flies are considered excellent research subjects because they reproduce so much and share a good proportion of their DNA with humans. It was a teachable moment that most reporters didn’t touch.

More salient to my research, I think, is the notion that focusing on the context behind the news enables journalism to tell larger, more complex stories. I think that will inevitably mean connecting those stories to science, in many cases. So much of science relates to the stuff of daily life – language, money, nutrition, health, technology, relationships, transportation, you-name-it. Cover crime deeply enough, and you’ll end up studying sociology, psychology, anthropology, neuroscience, and probably epidemiology. And my research is all about the continual deepening and expansion of the product of journalism.

Your thoughts?

The past week has been a hectic one, between being a good host, polishing off a News Challenge grant application, attending a daylong symposium on CMSes led by these folks, feverishly refreshing my “election ‘08 rock stars” folder in Google Reader, and spending much of yesterday brainstorming about news site structure with my fellow Fellow Jane Stevens.

More consensus, by way of Newsmaven and Journerdism:

• Paul Gillin’s on board: “In the old days, publishing was the end of a process; today, it’s the beginning. Once a story is published, it’s subject to enhancement, analysis, commentary and updates. Journalists need to be ready for the likelihood that they may be called upon to revise and develop a story long after it’s been published. It’s the Wikipedia model gone mainstream. Stories never die as long as there’s some who’s still interested in them.”
• Google’s Marissa Mayer is on board: She echoes what Google senior adviser Richard Gingras had said about the article becoming the atomic unit of news consumption. My quibbles with that contention persist.

The Christian Science Monitor, now in training to become a newsmagazine, sounds like it’s not fully on board yet, but it’s beginning the pre-boarding process:

[CSM editor John] Yemma said he sees planning some of the pieces for the weekly in a way that helps create topics pages for the Web site. For instance, the prototype of the new magazine has a cover story called the “Putin Generation.” That piece would eventually slide onto the topics page of CSMonitor.com for Russia.

“In a sense, the magazine helps us kind of create, over time, a sort of Monitor encyclopedia of the world that will be a living encyclopedia,” he said. “The web is about relatively short, relatively fast updates. The magazine is more in-depth and the two work together on the Web.”

Happy Halloween, Newsless readers. I’ll be dressing up as Jeremiah Wright tonight.

It rarely fails. When I’m talking about my project, whether I introduce it or not, the word “wiki” will always pop up in the discussion. Sometimes I try to preempt it — “I called my project ‘Wikipedia-ing the News,’ but that’s a misnomer, since the prototype probably won’t be publicly editable …” — but even then, folks invariably come away convinced that the core idea of my project is that news sites should be open to public editing. I’m definitely not saying they shouldn’t, mind you, but the whole issue is askance of my focus with this research project.

Partly to illustrate that point, and partly to get some dialogue going, let me outline a few possible community contribution models a Newsless.org-certified news site could follow, if a traditional news organization were to start it:

• Closed to non-newsroom contributions: All edits to stories are made by newsroom staff, just the way they are on most big-media news sites today. For better or worse, this is the model we’ll likely use for the prototype, though I do want to make sure we provide a robust forum for community engagement.¹
• Completely open to non-newsroom contributions: A straight-up wiki, through and through.
• A mix of closed and open sections: The Wikipedia model. Particularly controversial topics could be placed under edit restrictions, while lower-intensity subjects could be open to public editing.
• Community contributions are moderated: There are many ways that could work. For example, here are two:
  • The newsroom controls a “final” version of the site, and a “draft” version is open to the community. Similar to the way most open-source software projects work. In the default view, all content has been vetted by authorized editors, but if you wanted to contribute information, you could add it to the draft version of any page. At regular intervals, editors vet new contributions to the draft site and commit valid changes to the core site.
  • Community members’ edits are held in moderation until approved. Similar to the one above, but there’s only one version of the site. Another twist on this approach is that you might allow good contributors to gain automatic edit rights if their edits are consistently approved.

Many potential approaches, each with certain tradeoffs and advantages. Any of them could work with the structural transformation in journalism we’re outlining here.

1. Although comments on stories clearly count as “community contributions,” I’m excluding them from all of these models. For the purposes of this post, let’s define “contributions” as edits or addition to the core site content. [↩]

All right, this is it for the transparency series for a while, but I needed to clear my system before I could get to some other topics.

The other day, Newsmaven made another point worth repeating. In the context of an ongoing story, transparency takes on a new significance:

In this model where facts are added to event and issue topic pages which are continually augmented, corrected and edited in a Wikipedia-like database, there is no single point where the ’story’ is finished and published, so you can’t define a point where the process is ready to be revealed. The process is open, and part of the ongoing story.

In today’s world, once a story is published, criticisms from readers can draw only one of two responses: defense or apology.¹ But if we reinvent a story as something dynamic and evolving, sharing our work and inviting comment offers us an opportunity to constantly improve it. Not just to “get it right,” but to constantly get it more right.²

When I wrote about the idea of a separation of powers in journalism, I had in mind this notion of a transparent newsroom, where the acts of gathering and filtering information are actually outputs of the process of journalism, not just components. I finished that post by asking what news might look like if we published more of the raw materials of the process — interview transcripts, raw video, and things like that. Let me broaden that a bit to say we should air not just our materials but our methods.

1. Don’t get me wrong, we learn lessons from these criticisms as well, but I’m purposely discounting our promises to do better next time. [↩]
2. My friend Rex had a great idea that never came to fruition while he was working at MSNBC. He was toying with the idea of placing a slider at the top of every news story, to allow users to see the history of revisions on each story. As you pulled the slider from left to right, you could see how the story evolved over time, as new facts were added and old ones removed or deemphasized. One day we’ll see this idea in action. [↩]

Or, How Wikipedia talk pages are like newsrooms.

As Newsmaven’s recent comments reminded me, I’m convinced nothing captures the dynamic of a newsroom dialogue about a difficult story better than a Wikipedia talk page. If you have never waded into a talk page discussion, definitely do take a look. I’m almost always impressed by the sincerity of the Wikipedia editors’ desire to get the story right, and their diligence in shepherding tricky editorial issues to a conclusion. They grapple with a range of truly journalistic issues with a scrupulousness that would satisfy the most severe editor.

In the Barack Obama article, for example, an editor asks whether the lede of the article sounds too promotional:

“After announcing his presidential campaign in February 2007, Obama emphasized withdrawing American troops from Iraq, energy independence, decreasing the influence of lobbyists, and promoting universal health care as top national priorities.”

None of the other 3 candidates have a section which describes their campaign goals, so I have a few questions: 1. Is this type of language appropriate for Obama? 2. Would a sentence like this be appropriate for each of the other candidates? If not, why?

Our stories certainly don’t betray the back-and-forth that goes into making decisions about which information to include and how to present it. But I imagine if they did, the result would look a lot like a talk page.

Truth is an asymptote. Yes, you can say something true, but you can always say something truer.

Just wanted to get that out there.

I was all set to jump in and make some points in the comments to yesterday’s post, but you guys covered all the points I would have made, and set me up for another couple of posts today. Thanks, hive mind! So, to summarize, synthesize, and hopefully extend:

Transparency involves reporting what you don’t know. R.S. asked a great question — “Isn’t the role of journalist to process whatever doubts they have about a situation internally, gather more information, and then report the story?”

Tim gave an elegant answer:

It’s worth noting that in the early stages of reporting the attorney scandal, TPM didn’t say, “clearly there’s a political scandal of monumentous proportions at work, orchestrated by Karl Rove as part of a widespread attempt to legitimate charges of voter fraud to disenfranchise Democratic voters and win elections.” They reported the facts as known — with the full story incomplete and unfinished — plus a question mark.

Exactly. One of the striking elements of the TPM coverage is how restrained the editors were (despite their ideological motivations) about speculating or drawing conclusions. Instead, they ask good, fair, pointed questions, then dig for the answers to those questions. In this case, “Why did all these highly competent U.S. attorneys get fired?” was an excellent question.¹

I don’t think most people are naturally good at asking fair-but-provocative questions, or separating inquiry from speculation and insinuation. I include many journalists in this assessment. Earlier this fall, for example, Andrew Sullivan packaged a host of barely-baked questions about Sarah and Trig Palin into a rather embarrassing innuendo-fest.

That’s all the more reason why the Josh Marshalls and Renee Fergusons of the world, who have a knack for this sort of thing, should help clue the rest of us in on when a nagging question rises to the level of an investigative treasure map. TPM-like transparency is a great way to do that.

1. Previously, I identified pattern recognition as one of the traits of the best investigative reporters. The instinct that inspires folks like Josh Marshall and Renee Ferguson to ask and pursue good questions is another. [↩]

I’ve been mum for the past week because I’ve been working through some thoughts on transparency that have been threatening to turn into one spiraling, omnibus post. But I think these thoughts might cohere better if I break them up. So here’s a start:

Assumption: Whatever the information ecosystem of the future looks like, it will involve more people taking more responsibility for producing and filtering their own media.

Consequently, let’s posit that these folks might benefit from knowing some of the better techniques journalists have refined for evaluating and presenting information. Let’s also suppose that this knowledge is not already widespread, largely because we’ve muddied it up with a lot of pointless conventions that obscure some of the best components of the journalistic process.¹

What I’m getting at is the notion that journalists are acquiring a growing responsibility to let our communities in on how we do our work, for reasons that have little to do with the transparency battles of yesteryear. Increasingly, transparency is an instrument not just for enhancing the credibility of our journalism, but especially for informing an audience that might want to extend or repeat or improve it.

One of the least-remarked-upon aspects of the best journalistic blogging is how much it demystifies the process of journalism. The work that earned Josh Marshall and company a Polk Award seems so humble and accessible in retrospect. Follow the dots the TPM crew connects as they start to unearth the extent of the story, and you might just begin to believe you could do something like this yourself. The very tone of the coverage invites participation. From 1/15/07:

Strange days? Less than a week after news broke that the Bush administration has forced the resignation of San Diego U.S. attorney Carole Lam, we learn that it has done the same to Daniel Bogden, U.S. attorney for Nevada.

According to today’s Las Vegas Review-Journal, no one seems to know why he’s been asked to leave before his term expires in 2008. As in Lam’s ouster, there appear to be no charges of wrongdoing against Bogden.

There’s a question mark here. There’s an implied mystery — “no one seems to know.” The blogger has told us why the story piques his curiosity, what he knows and where he learned it, and what he hopes to find out next. Meanwhile, his fellow muckrakers — in the best muckrakish tradition — are breathlessly promising “More soon!”²

Notice that transparency doesn’t obfuscate narrative here, it facilitates it. The way the TPM reporters frame
their work makes you want to know what happens next. In the past, we’ve envisioned transparency as a cumbersome add-on to the reporting and storytelling process (e.g. a “How we reported the story” sidebar). Bloggers have shown that it doesn’t have to be that way.

Contrast the TPM blogging with the first New York Times story to hint at the scandal, published five days after Josh Marshall’s muckrakers started to smell a rat. That story is a black box, arriving as a seamless package of factory-assembled facts, with no history or future.

My hunch is that journalists will do ourselves and our societies a favor by building on the approach demonstrated by TPM and other bloggers inside and outside of Big Media. If we do our part to spread knowledge about how we acquire and evaluate information, we make it likelier that our audiences will consider that knowledge as they do the same. Exposing our methods in a more open fashion might allow them to be criticized, but who’s to say those critiques won’t help us improve those methods?

For these reasons and others, I intend to ask the reporters working on the prototype to blog their progress as they gather and filter information for the site. Of course, the blog will also be a forum (not the only one, I think) for the community of people deeply interested in the topics we’ll be covering.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t expect that just because we blog transparently, folks will magically start turning into journalistic savants right and left. But I do think it’s an important piece of how journalism should change. More (!) on this forthcoming.

1. Like, for example, our unwillingness to use the first person, which produces a stilted, distancing prose in its best moments, and actually misleads or confuses in its worst. Or our insistence on he-said/she-said journalism, which continues to be a significant black mark on our coverage of some of the most important issues of our era, such as climate change. Or our recent nonsensical contention that good journalism was somehow antithetical to blogging, which means moments like this just serve us right. We’ve expended so much energy upholding such superficial conventions as being somehow useful for evaluating what constitutes authentic journalism, that we’re shocked to discover how easily those conventions are aped and our public deceived. [↩]
2. Marshall has a practical reason for this approach: his brand of reporting relies on audience participation. If the Talking Points Memo community wasn’t tipping him off to reports of attorneys being dismissed across the country, it would have been much more difficult for him to piece the story together. [↩]