Newsless.org

I just sat in on a budget meeting/class at the Columbia Missourian, where the topic du jour was city planning and zoning. City editor Scott Swafford gave a wonderfully informative 30-minute spiel on the basics of Columbia zoning.

More than almost anything else, zoning determines a place’s character - what its neighborhoods will feel like, how vibrant its downtown will be. Many of the most arresting local stories originate on this beat, as residents’ notions of what their city can become clash and fuse with each other.

But many zoning stories also dull readers with droning accounts of arcane city planning processes, byzantine rules and obscure details. Scott distilled some of those rules and processes down to a perfectly digestible essence in his 30-minute lecture, explaining, for example, what it means for a parcel of land to be designated “C-3″ (general business district). He also walked through the evolution of the principles that now govern zoning in the city of Columbia, giving us a useful backgrounder on the current hot topics and what they mean for the future of the place.

I couldn’t help but think that most residents of the city probably don’t know this information, but would find it fascinating. That’s the type of information reporters and editors often possess in spades, but it appears in their work only in sporadic trickles. If we could easily deliver this sort of background to our audiences, I think we could create a market for more information on this topic, and rescue our zoning stories from the page B4 backwater where they currently fester.

In the coming days, I’ll write more about the information surplus that news organizations enjoy (but don’t employ).

Update: Here’s my post on the info surplus.