It all bubbles up
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.
Related posts:
- Thoughts on a historic year I’ve written a lot here about evolving journalism to enable...
- Yelvington’s on board Nice. Every local newspaper should become an evolving resource online....
So, here’s a thought. What kinds of news stories does a focus on events rather than patterns miss or distort?
1) McCain’s delayed debate / the financial crisis. Here both stories get significant play, although clearly the individual events, if overweighted, can turn the broader story into a discrete drama, the explanation of the crisis into an analysis of the horserace. History.
2) Families living in storage lockers. There isn’t a news “event” here until you have something that accidentally reveals it, like the fire. Cultural and environmental trends. (Global warming is in some ways so desparate for “events” to get people’s attention” that it claims hurricanes and the collapse of icebergs.)
3) The series of shootings. This seems to me to be different. It’s not a trend searching for an event, or an event that throws its gravity around a story. You could say that coverage of the event precludes coverage of the story. People living in storage lockers? Nobody’s covering that. But isolated homicides? We’ve covered that. It’s done. The news is over.
Tim
24 Sep 08 at 10:48 pm
A tangent of sorts -
Neal Stephenson’s book Snow Crash forsaw people living in storage lockers (as well as the web).
Also from S.C., the expression “condensing fact from the vapor of nuance”, which is another approach to pattern recognition.
Maybe the 5 W’s needs a 6th - “What’s the larger story?”
Anna Haynes
25 Sep 08 at 7:34 pm
[...] (the advertising) from the story (the context, the interconnected ecosystem of nodes that “bubble up” to a something much bigger). For, as Matt [of Newsless.org] says, somewhat echoing a [...]
The Article is Dead; the Story is King | PSFK - Trends, Ideas & Inspiration
24 Oct 08 at 11:10 am