Newsless.org

OK. I’m taking a break from stock-piling dollar bills beneath my mattress to utter really the only trenchant observations I can summon amidst all this.

First, having been obsessively reloading a number of news sources for most of the day, the most cogent reaction I’ve read so far has been this, from the Columbia Journalism Review:

The crisis presents a moment for reflection. For the business press, there are only two options when considering what has happened here, neither particularly good. Either the business press institutionally provided appropriate arms-length scrutiny of the financial-services industry, including investigative work, opinion, analysis and rigorous beat reporting that provided decision-makers, including readers, with fair warnings of the coming collapse, and it was ignored, or it didn’t do the work in the first place. We know that the answer is some combination of the two. But, if we accept the foregoing logic, then best case for the business media is that what it writes doesn’t matter, in which case, why bother?

Clearly this crisis is not all about the press, but the press is critically implicated, as it was after Enron. Part of that failure is now in the past, and unrecoverable — the revelation that Wall Street was a fraud came too late to avert the evaporation of hundreds of billions of dollars; while the stage was being set for one of the biggest stories of our lives, the press seems to have been asleep on the job. But part of the failure is ongoing.

Clay Aiken vs. the bailout on Google Trends

We suffer from a giant, collective understanding gap about the crisis and the proposed solutions. Polls suggest citizens are missing key facts about the bailout, and that this disparity of information may be the single biggest factor in the bill’s reception among the public. Yet there’s clearly a hunger for information; the recently outed Clay Aiken took a back seat to the bailout on Google Trends this past week. Of course, the biggest question — what on earth is going to happen now? — is unknowable. But there’s a lot we do know …

• At a high level, what led to the current crisis?
• What are some historical analogues to the crisis?
• What, in plain English, did the amended bailout plan propose to do?
• What did economists and others cite as the merits and demerits of such a plan?
• What alternatives have been attracted serious economist attention, and what are their pros and cons?
• What’s the worst-case scenario?

Yet journalists are still failing to deliver this information accessibly. All of it is scattered across hundreds of news sites, government reports, blog posts, &c. And even in the places it appears, all of this contextual information is being buried by the avalanche of breaking news on the topic, much of which plays up the overheated soap opera on the Hill, little of which adds to an understanding of the factors at work and how they might affect us.

Among the best comprehensive coverage I’ve seen are a reasonably robust article sidebar from the BBC, the NYT topic page on the bailout plan, and a nice summary page from the Financial Times. But each of these requires the reader to do a massive amount of work to start answering some of the basic questions above. They haven’t packaged this information together or even linked it up in an accessible manner for someone looking for decent background on the issue. Instead, they offer a hodgepodge of headlines, most of which relate to unfolding news events.

The single most straightforward source providing a readable background of the issue as well as broken-out sections on all the elements I alluded to (components of the bailout, possible effects, alternatives, reactions)? I probably don’t need to tell you.

How is it possible that no one in the news industry has created a comprehensive-yet-approachable site to deliver the context necessary to grasp this crisis? It wouldn’t take much. A Web designer with a flair for the minimalistic. One or two business reporters who can translate economese. Several stark, straightforward subject headings — History, Ideas, Politics, What’s Ahead — that sort of thing. A link-path to guide the lazy and uninitiated from beginning to end. And a great editor to keep it all concise, eloquent and accurate.

Executed well, it would be such a tremendous service. I imagine it would garner a significant audience, and it might prove to be the hub for a more productive, less fragmented discussion than has occurred so far. It would be a step towards redemption for whatever failures contributed to this moment.

The books, the Frontline episodes, the newspaper series and all the other Pulitzer bait will come eventually. But probably too late to offer understanding that could make a difference now.

Update: Howard Owens has a good post castigating the Patriot-Act-ish deference the press has given the administration and Wall Street in the wake of all this. He ends up converging with some of the same points I make above. For both his post and mine, standard caveats apply — it’s incredibly easy to throw stones at the press; plenty of excellent reportage has been done; Dean Starkman made an excellent tenth point (”Journalism is something but it isn’t everything”). But I still think there’s a lot of valid and valuable criticism here.

OK, this post is a little off-the-beaten-path of my main argument, but it’s somewhat relevant. Over the past several years, parallel trends led the evolution of Web design and Web development, and I wonder if there’s a parable in here for journalism.

If you were a Web designer in 2000, the ultimate product of your work was typically an HTML document. Unfortunately, HTML wasn’t built to handle design, so sophisticated looks were only possible with a fairly cumbersome amount of hackery. Imagine trying to lay out a Web page in Excel. (I’m really not exaggerating.) Designers had to slice up images to fit precisely into a matrix of table cells. Every element on the page — each headline, each paragraph, each image — was wrapped in code specifying where it should go and what it should look like. Changing the look of a bunch of Web pages meant wading into each and every page and carefully altering the code.

Right around that time, some forward-thinking designers began a push to separate the design of a Web page from its content. With the popular adoption of CSS, designers were freed from spreadsheet layouts, and they could set flexible but universal rules for how page elements should be displayed. They could easily set paragraphs in the body of an article to look one way and paragraphs in the article’s sidebar to look another. And best of all, this could all be done in a single stylesheet document which was completely separate from any content. Altering the look of all your pages meant simply altering a rule in the stylesheet.

Meanwhile, a Web developer in 2000 was probably using the coding language PHP. The defining advantage of this language was that its code could be deposited right into an HTML document, allowing developers to write mini-applications in the middle of a Web page … instant gratification. And many did. But it often had the consequence of tying code and content together, which got messy real quick. This and other aspects of the language did little to encourage coding discipline, and Web applications from the era were often slapdash concoctions that scaled poorly and inhibited collaboration.

In recent years, developers have followed designers en masse in seeking to isolate the different elements of a Web application. The database schema was neatly defined in one realm, the functions that interacted with the database were segregated in another, and the templates that called those functions had their own place as well. Although the same developers often still work in all three realms, they’re increasingly turning to frameworks like Django and Ruby on Rails to help enforce that separation of tasks.

Your typical act of journalism today comprises at least three fairly discrete functions. We first (1) gather, then (2) filter, and finally (3) present information. Might we be able to build a case for giving each of those functions its due?

What if each news site had a repository where we attempt to publicly store most of the data we collect — interview recordings/transcripts, FOIA-ed documents, databases, raw video, etc.? And what if we also provided a sandbox where our users could annotate those transcripts, highlight documents, point out patterns in the data? And then finally, give them a platform on which to present their findings, encouraging them to tell creative and engaging stories?

Of course, the stuff of our trade — truth and information — is messier than code and even design. I doubt journalism will ever be orderly, and some of the best stuff is the product of no discernible process or discipline. But I think there are respects in which our tendency to see the act of journalism as a sort of undifferentiated muddle might hamper our creativity about what journalism can be.

This, via Journalism Hope, is a pretty hefty endorsement:

[Google senior adviser Richard] Gingras urges editors to take a lesson from Wikipedia’s redefinition of the encyclopedia.Although it has no original reporting, Wikipedia is becoming a popular source for news. To illustrate this, Gingras shows a recent Google search on the anthrax attacks. The first result: a Wikipedia article. The second: The site of a man who has been researching and following the case for several years. People are going to these sites, and referring others to them, in large enough numbers to drive them to the top of page rankings, he says.

The Wikipedia article is nearly 5,000 words and also has multiple sources linked. On big news stories, Gingras argues, Wikipedia’s contributors usually go a good job of pulling together a lot of reliable material — often from newspaper sites — and updating it continually.

See, even Google thinks Wikipedia offers news editors a model to examine. Although I’d quibble with this:

He offers a premise: the atomic unit of news content has changed. That’s what happened with music. Until a few years ago, the atomic unit of music was albums. But with the development of mp3, it became the song. “It’s not about your site, it’s about the article,” Gingras says.

I’d argue that the article (and the mp3) is a molecular unit. Right now, I’d say the fact (and, extending the analogy, the sample) is the atomic unit of news. More on that in a few minutes …

This fellow’s on board. And Howard Weaver gives a shout-out, although he says, “I haven’t got my brain completely around it yet.”

Neither have I, of course, which is why I’m at RJI.

I’m operating under a number of assumptions as I undertake this research. I’ve articulated one of them — that an increase in understanding of a news topic might also increase our appetite for further information on that topic. Now, building off of yesterday’s post, let me articulate another:

I believe every news event represents a data point in a larger story.

We recognize this in obvious cases — McCain calling for a delayed debate is a node in the story of the $700B bailout plan, which is a node in the story of the financial crisis, etc. But we don’t apply this logic consistently to the smaller news events that decorate our sites daily.

I’m looking at the local section on StarTribune.com. There’s a headline about a kid who got shot in a bar. Just a few headlines down, there’s one grimly commemorating a pair of shootings at a local high school. Further down, we read about a young woman found shot to death in her boyfriend’s car.

We treat these events as separate, self-contained stories. To the extent we ever connect the dots of the larger stories in play — gun violence; premature deaths among youths — it’s rather oblique. At most, the incidents might find their way onto a homicide map. But if we recognized the place each event holds in a larger story, over time the connections will become plain.

Maybe the radical suggestion here is that every news event is similarly connected. The traffic jam caused by an accident on the highway seems like a momentary, disconnected thing, but even that near-daily occurrence is a data point in a larger story about why, where and when accidents occur. I’ve long wondered why every citizen doesn’t have access to a Google map of all her city’s roads, filterable by time and date, showing what have been the most accident-prone intersections and times to drive in her city. It’s not as though we don’t have this information, or that the information wouldn’t be valuable. Which brings me to another assumption:

That larger story is the more important one to tell.

Don’t get me wrong, stories about individual moments and people are important to conveying any larger narrative. To convey the incompetent planning for the war in Iraq, Rajiv Chandrasekaran didn’t just cite statistics or draw graphs, he wove together a pastiche of human stories. But we should keep our eye on the ball. It’s less important for our audience to know about a particular shooting in a bar than it is for them to know how gun violence affects their city and what causes it.

And while knowing about an accident on a highway fills an important need to know which road to take to work, common knowledge of the circumstances under which such accidents occur could help us avoid them in the first place.

At UNITY this year, I attended an amazing panel on how to sustain investigative journalism during this time of crisis in the news industry. The most impressive panelist was a woman named Renee Ferguson, an award-winning reporter from KMAQ-TV in Chicago. She related this anecdote:

“The other day, our chopper reporter covered a fire. It was a fire in [a storage facility]. Just kind of as an aside, he said, ‘There was a family living in here, but when the roof caved in, they got out OK, no problem.’ And I said, ‘A family living in a storage locker?’

That day, we set out to find families living in storage lockers. You will not believe how many families are living in storage lockers. They are air-conditioned, they are safe, they are clean, and people are living in them. And in Chicago, it was so easy to do this story. In a day. It took us a day. And it started with a fire.”

Listening to Renee, I realized that her strength as an investigator was her pattern recognition, the ability to tie little stories together into larger ones. It lent weight to my conclusion that moving from little-j journalism to big-J Journalism isn’t necessarily a matter of spending more money or producing 90-inch stories. It’s about connecting the dots. Telling the larger story.

When I talk about the importance of context in journalism, I often invoke a quote by Will Tacy, my boss at the Star Tribune: “The article is not the story.”

To wit: the story of our present financial crisis is a web of inextricable realities that lack defined beginnings and endings and can be described — but never contained — by an article or set of articles. On the Web, the lowly, essentially static article often proves an insufficient instrument with which to present stories, yet the basic unit of today’s news site is still the article. For this reason, we still find it difficult to tell our most complex stories well on the Web.

From what I can tell, we inherited this state of affairs from our printed predecessors. When we started news sites, there was just no other plainly obvious way to present news stories, and most of those stories were coming from the newspaper at any rate. So we presented them on the Web the same way we do in print — discrete, self-contained compositions, including whatever context could fit into a paragraph or two, ornamented with photos and graphics.

But the format quickly began to strain under the pressure of being an unnatural vehicle for news on the Web. First, there was an early, striking dissonance between what was fixed forever on paper, and what appeared online. How to handle corrections? Minor updates?

Then, after we’d won the battle of publishing online first (minor insurgencies excepted), the terse, Web-first version of the article either changed drastically as the print deadline approached, got deleted altogether, or continued awkwardly to exist after the print version was up.

Updating online articles was another problem, especially during breaking news. What merited an annexation to an existent article and what required a new article altogether? How do you avoid the Frankenstein effect apparent when an article is altered by different editors over time? (If you were feverishly reloading the CNN website when results came in from this spring’s Democratic primaries, as I was, you saw the Frankenstein effect in living color.)

Some news sites are beginning to break away from using articles as their essential building blocks. You’re finding more and more ongoing developments handled by Web-native formats such as blogs — where adding context is a matter of adding a link, there’s enough continuity to grow a community around, and there are fewer limitations on length and voice. (For example, try clicking around on the headlines gracing the front page of the St. Pete Times site.) Wikis are another Web-native format, which is why they so elegantly handle both background and news.

We’ve been wedging our stories into articles for so long, it can be difficult to separate the two. But a big part of the opportunity before us is to start telling grand, complex and unending stories with tools fit for the task.

Even though I’m more interested in the “-pedia” part than the “wiki” part, I’m not altogether uninterested in the latter. As I begin laying the groundwork for the prototype we’ll be constructing next semester, I’m working with a doctoral student, Kyle Heim, to interview the top editors of some of the most robust local wiki projects around — DavisWiki (Davis, CA), RocWiki (Rochester, NY), OmahaWiki (Omaha, NE), and WikiProject Columbia (Columbia, MO - actually part of Wikipedia itself).

We hope to get a sense from these editors about everything from the goals and scope of their sites, to whom they see as their audiences, to their relationships with official news outlets in their cities, to how they’ve organized the project.

Any other examples of sites in this vein you think we should explore? (I have another post coming, on efforts by news sites to package their stories together by topic.)

You can’t tell from my blogging, but I’ve gotten rather sensitive about the word “Wikipedia.”

Earlier this year, after I’d written my research proposal, I was casting about for a title to communicate the core concept I hoped to pursue. I recalled a whitepaper by Shayne Bowman, Ellen Kampinsky and Chris Willis called “Amazon-ing the News,” which I thought snappily conveyed what they were about. Just before sending it off to the folks at Reynolds, I slapped on the title “Wikipedia-ing the News,” with a little note-to-self to think of something better.

So now, every time my project gets introduced, the word “Wikipedia” is thrust into an expectant void, and opinions are formed before I say the first word about my research. Thus, as I mentioned, I’m a teensy bit sensitive. But it’s probably time to confront the W-bomb head-on.

When I mention Wikipedia, my listener’s full attention turns automatically to the “wiki” part. It’s editable by anyone. All of the tricky issues inherent in the public, anonymous provenance of the site’s information come rushing to mind before we even get to the “pedia” suffix. But that suffix is where my fascinations — and my research questions — begin.

Let’s get the wikinoia out of the way. The news site I’m theorizing will be completely agnostic as to who creates the content. You could make a version of this news site where all content comes from (1) a newsroom of professional reporters and editors, (2) a nebulous and voluntary set of “citizens from the community,” (3) a hybrid of professional journalists and community contributors (more on that much later), or (4) Maureen Dowd. I don’t care. (OK, except for 4, which would be a travesty. I do not in any way authorize the use of my ideas to further MoDo’s influence on the world.)

As I mentioned in my last post, “encyclopedia” is too small and ancient a word to describe Wikipedia. The site has no predecessor for how it organizes archival and contextual information while accommodating breaking news, how it shepherds dozens of competing voices towards consensus, how it manages to make information more valuable over time rather than less, how it incorporates communities, how it became t_{he most search-engine-optimized site on the Web} …

The site has no predecessor, period. There’s a ton for news sites to learn from it. And there are many questions to address for how to translate what we learn to a journalism context. It’s not the only inspiration or example I’ll draw on for this project, but it’s a big one.

Or: The 1991 problem

As I sort-of argue in my research proposal, Wikipedia isn’t an encyclopedia, but that’s the best word we’ve got. (Actually I called it a “useful shorthand,” but I meant that to be backhanded.) Given its unbound, dynamic, hyperlinked nature, we just don’t have the vocabulary to really describe what Wikipedia is, so we use the word encyclopedia as a familiar point of reference.

Call it the 1991 Problem. We’re still stuck with the language of 1991 while discussing the technologies of 2008.

Imagine yourself trying to describe an iPhone to an average Joe from 1991. By calling it a phone, you instantly constrain the fellow’s sense of what you’re describing. “Well, yes, it’s a telephone. But it doesn’t have any wires and you can use it from anywhere. Also, the whole thing is a computer that you operate by touching the screen. And it’s sort of a hyper-charged Walkman, too. Oh, and it can tell you where you are on a map, and which of your friends are nearby, and where the nearest pizza place is. And don’t get me started on visual voicemail …”

The iPhone is to the telephone what Wikipedia is to the encyclopedia.

en · cy · clo · pe · di · a [en-sahy-kluh-pee-dee-uh] - noun - 1) a book or set of books containing articles on various topics, usually in alphabetical arrangement, covering all branches of knowledge or, less commonly, all aspects of one subject.

When we say “encyclopedia,” that’s (^) what’s running through the head of Joe from 1991. Wikipedia encompasses a compendium of fantastically diverse pages, some of which are merely collections of links to other pages, each of which features a thoughtful conversation about the material included or excluded from the page. It’s a set of procedures for organizing vast and diverse subsets of information. It’s a sizeable and devoted community. It’s a Web application. “Encyclopedia” doesn’t even begin to cover it.

I want there to be a 1991 problem for news. I want to make a news site so novel and amazing Joe wouldn’t even know what hit him.

One of my favorite insights embedded in Vin Crosbie’s excellent essay on the state of the US newspaper industry:

[Newspaper editors] came to believe that producing a common edition for everyone is their raison d’être, forgetting it arose as a limitation of their technology. Fitting psychologist Abraham Maslow’s statement that “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail,” the editorial production limitation of Gutenberg’s technology has led most newspaper editors to believe that they set the ‘common agenda’ for their community and likewise that their community’s readership is somehow homogenous because it reads the same newspaper edition on any given day.

It’s amazing that you still hear this canard so often in the annals of journalism. We’ve come to view the newspaper’s inability to break out of a one-size-fits-all general-interest format as a feature, not a bug. Vin provides a delicious example to illustrate the point: “The top headline on the front page of a 120,000 circulation daily published Monday was ‘Builder Gets OK for Road Change’ about an access road bordering one of dozens of shopping plazas in a New York State suburban county with 160 miles of public roads and nearly one million residents.”

Given such an example, I’d give it five minutes before Old School Journalist X is ranting about how expanded choice in media allows us to retreat into our respective ideological corners. Ten minutes max till he pulls out Bowling Alone.

I’m certainly not going to argue there’s nothing of value in the idea of a news commons. I’m as frightened as the next guy of the prospect of someone getting all her news filtered through FreeRepublic. I also don’t believe in the news commons as an inviolable democratic principle passed down to us by George Jesus Washington Christ himself, however. And there’s a very strong critique to be made of the notion that there should be a few authoritative information oracles consulted by all.

But all these arguments are quickly becoming moot. The news commons is dying a little more each day. The question before us is what we will replace it with. Which brings me to a thought-provoking paper by Mark Deuze published this summer in the International Journal of Communication, entitled “The Changing Context of News Work: Liquid Journalism and Monitorial Citizenship.”

If you’re looking for a neat treatise on how to evolve journalism for the 21st Century, look elsewhere, as Deuze himself concedes somewhere around page 13. But if you’re interested in a successor to the news commons, Deuze begins to posit a replacement:

If the old model of journalism was to push news to the masses so they could vote informed in representative democracy, the argument as outlined in this essay begs the question of how the new media ecology contributes to a new or renewed form of citizenship, and what the role of journalism in such a context would be. Whether or not one is optimistic or hopeful about the collective intelligence found online and the networked individualism offline, it seems doubtful that it is possible to call upon citizens to embrace some sense of socially cohesive purpose that is based on their social identity as centrally informed members of a mass audience: an audience of voters for politics, and an audience of consumers for journalism.

Instead of focusing on voter apathy, one could argue that democracy has arrived at its most successful stage yet: a phase where people trust or believe the political system will function regardless whether they engage with it or not. [Emphasis mine.] If democracy effectively means outsourcing governance to a political elite, it has succeeded. However, this is not exactly what is happening. Rather than voter disinterest or civic disengagement, we see another, more anti-hierarchical and deeply individualized type of citizenship emerging. This is the attitude of the citizen-consumer.

Just today, I gave a talk in which I mentioned that our information landscape had changed drastically, and so the role of journalism has to change. Typically, I throw a line in there about how media literacy is becoming much more important, and how we need to empower citizens with better tools for telling stories and evaluating information. But the changing role of a citizen in a democracy is even more fundamental. We should consider this central to the question of a successor to the news commons.