Newsless.org

Jay Rosen’s been on something of a tear recently over the notion that news sites should be paying much more attention to the explanatory function behind their journalism. After having been somewhat indifferent to stories about the subprime crisis and its effects on the lending industry, Jay heard the “Giant Pool of Money” episode of This American Life. The episode gave him an entertaining yet comprehensive understanding of the crisis, and he found himself seeking out more news on the topic.

By explaining the background of the story to Jay, TAL had made him a consumer for more information about the story. Jay’s conclusion:

If the providers of information aren’t providing the basic explainers that turn people into customers for that information, they don’t deserve those customers and won’t retain them. If explanation is required for information acquisition, then the explainer comes “before” the informer as a pre-requisite. We typically have it the other way around.

So as we think about new models for news we need to think about expanding that little what’s this? feature you sometimes see on effective web sites. That’s not about web design. That’s a whole category in journalism that I fear we do not understand at all.

This conclusion is central to my research. I think there’s a giant realm of news stories our audiences don’t understand enough to be interested in them. To an extent, of course, that’ll always be true. But rather than continuously attempt to enlarge the audience for a given story, we pitch our stories only to the fraction of our audience that already understands the context.

What if we make it easy for our audience to get quickly up to speed on any topic? (And by “easy,” I don’t just mean a collection of our headlines on a given story. I’m talking more this speed.) Could we expand the audience for more of our coverage?

I suspect we could.

In case my research proposal’s too long for you, try this on for size:

I want to shift the focus of news websites from telling audiences what happened recently to telling them what’s happening. I intend to prototype a news website where the latest developments are fed into a living archive of information on a topic, making it easy to get the background and context as well as the current status of a story, rather than posting updates as ephemeral, disconnected articles that fade quickly in relevance.

This month’s editorial:

What if newspapers—if they are destined to be niche reads—took those young readers at their word and claimed the depth-and-knowledge niche and sold that? Despite their diminished resources, they could still dominate the field. Such a niche could even fit with a hyperlocal approach. Lee Abrams strikes us as an enthusiastic salesman—we’d love to see what he could do with a product that readers both want and need.

For some time now, I’ve been thinking and writing about many of the topics I intend to blog about. Here’s a little chronologically-ordered trip through some of my past writings.

• Journalists are so weird (7/04): In which I first implicitly express my disdain for our obsessive focus on breaking news, no matter how trivial.
• Who is a journalist? (3/05): “It’s journalism, not journalists, we should be struggling to protect. I think we sometimes lose that distinction.”
• ErrorPedia (4/05): In which I establish my fascination with Wikipedia, while proposing an interesting-if-problematic model for corrections on the Web.
• The era of slow news (7/05): “The Internet is slowing the news cycle down. Way down. It’s so slow, it’s turning the clock backwards.”
• Three rants on Rick (Part I) & Part II (11/05): Some snarky thoughts on citizen journalism, into which I also smuggle a mention of Wikipedia.
• ‘Pedia still astonishingly awesome (12/05): In which I yet again sing the praises of Wikipedia, including many comparisons to the newspaper. Don’t miss the comments.
• The press’ new paradigm (4/06): In which I discuss Watergate, Enron, and the transition from information scarcity to info overload. (One of Jason Kottke’s favorite links of 2006!)
• The intelligence pyramid (12/06): In which the Snarkmarket commenters and I explore the nature of truth.
• The attention deficit – the need for timeless journalism (8/07): In which I deliver my second major broadside against “the tyranny of recency.”
• Newspaper eulogy – a footnote (6/08): “There’s a lot I won’t miss about The Newspaper. And what I would miss, I firmly believe society can sustain. But to begin to figure out how, we’ve got to move beyond the conversation about rescuing The Newspaper, or saving Journalism, and talk specifically about what really matters.”

Nice.

Every local newspaper should become an evolving resource online. In addition to covering incremental stories, on the Internet we can and should build presentations that place the latest developments in the context of the longterm story arc.

Before I get too carried away, I should let you guys in on what I’ll be exploring during my year at the Reynolds Institute, so you can grok my frame of mind. This is my proposal as written, sent to the good folks at Reynolds on 2/28/08.

Wikipedia-ing the News¹

Five years ago, blogger Dave Winer and New York Times executive Martin Nisenholtz made a bet. “In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 02007,” Winer wagered, “weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times Web site.”

When it came time to judge the bet, blogs outranked the Times on four out of the five chosen stories, making Winer the winner. But the real news out of the bet was the site that trounced them both — Wikipedia.

In all that’s been written about Wikipedia, we tend to hear an emphasis on the same few details — the stupefying economics of its army of unpaid volunteers; the amazing order that has arisen out of its chaotic, ad hoc editing processes; hand-wringing over whether the resource is essentially trustworthy or not. But what fascinates me most about the site is its innovative, Web-native structure. “Encyclopedia” is a useful shorthand for describing what Wikipedia aims to do, but that label fails to capture the full reality of what Wikipedia can do. As the New York Times noted last year, the Web site works astonishingly well as a hub for news. In fact, I think it points the way forward for what our news sites should become, and that is what I propose to explore and prototype in a fellowship at the Reynolds Institute.

The online news sites of today remain hobbled by a framework inherited from their forbears. Almost every news site, whether affiliated with a radio outlet, a television station, a newspaper, or none of these, is structured around this one context — the most recent mix of interesting stories selected by editors. Yet users, especially those of geographically focused news sites, approach these sites with a dizzying variety of contexts in mind. What’s happening to my neighborhood? Who won last night’s game? How do I identify and contact my congressional representatives? What’s traffic like on the way to work? Who should I call to fix my faucet? In many of today’s online newsrooms, copious energy is expended addressing each of these contexts, usually one by one in near isolation.

I’m not the only one thinking along these lines. The American Press Institute’s February 2008 report “Making the Leap Beyond ‘Newspaper Companies’” posits the creation of a “localpedia” modeled after Wikipedia. And from my vantage point having worked in online newsrooms and spoken with leaders across the industry at conferences, I have a strong hunch that this idea is the embodiment of what we ultimately hope to create. But in newspapers, at least, we have been working backwards, slowly trying to extend our context of “daily news” into a context that is both timelier and more timeless.

To paint a broad picture: Imagine if the work of the hundreds of reporters dispatched daily to cover a city didn’t merely fade into an obscure archive, but added day after day to the work that came before it. An online news site in the era of Wikipedia would be a living archive, adaptable to suit any context, growing to encompass all aspects of life in a community. Entries would be deeply and meaningfully interlinked to other entries, elegantly situating every news event in multiple larger contexts. The “latest news” on the site could be a kind of changelog, reflecting new additions or edits in the system. The site would be a news commons atop which other narrative presentations of the news — stories, blogs, videos, games — could sit.

In a year at the Reynolds Institute, I would work to fill in the details of this sketch and explore several pathways for how we could get from here to there. This vision of the news presents much to investigate. Among the avenues of inquiry I would likely pursue in a fellowship:

• Workflow and organization: At the Star Tribune, I was the leader of a project to develop an internal taxonomy to categorize all the organization’s content and advertising. So I have a head start in thinking about how I would organize and populate a site that aimed to be the comprehensive information source for a region.
• Presentation: One of the deliverables I would intend to create as part of this fellowship is a prototype of the news site in action, ideally in partnership with students or faculty from the university’s visual journalism program. I’d also explore how such a site could adapt to the increasingly distributed nature of the Web, where information exists not only in Web browsers, but also in RSS readers, mobile phones, “widgets” embedded in other Web sites, and elsewhere.
• Social experience and user interaction: The largest project I have helmed during my time at the Star Tribune has been the creation of the award-winning arts-and-entertainment website Vita.mn, which boasts a staff of about 1.5 — a full-time designer and my part-time duties as editor. The vast majority of the content on the site is created by users. I’ve seen first-hand the power of user contributions as well as the difficulties they present. Given that the pool of potential contributors to a website with a local focus is an order of magnitude smaller than that of Wikipedia, the model for user contributions must be examined. My suspicion is that the minimally directed nature of collaboration on Wikipedia would take a much longer time to replicate on a local scale.
• Business model: Several possibilities exist for creating and sustaining such a site, and each presents different advantages and challenges. Enumerating and investigating these possibilities will increase the magnitude of the project’s impact.
• Storytelling and journalism standards: What does a corrections policy look like on a site that is always changing? How does Wikipedia’s “Neutral Point of View” model align with traditional notions of journalistic objectivity, and is either model appropriate for such a site? How might the site incorporate or interact with the increasing range of storytelling techniques available to us?
• Existing models: Several examples exist of geographically focused sites clearly inspired by the Wikipedia model. What can we learn from these efforts?

As well as a prototype illustrating a prospective news site structured according to this model, I would use my time at the Institute to produce a manuscript elucidating my findings. The document would serve as a roadmap for companies or communities seeking to make the idea a reality.

Journalism faces plenty of pressing questions, and I have an interest in many of them. But this question of what the next-generation news website looks like is one of the most pressing, and more than ample to capture my attention for a year. I would savor the opportunity to partner with you in pursuit of an answer.

1. I hate the title “Wikipedia-ing the News.” I slapped it onto the proposal at the last minute, and everyone who sees it instantly thinks, “Ah, he wants to make news sites into wikis.” I don’t. A wiki might very possibly be the best sort of a CMS to handle a site like this, but I’m totally unwilling to make that presupposition at this point. And as I try to make clear in the third paragraph, I’m using Wikipedia as a model for how it structures its content, not how it develops that content. At any rate, the title is an homage to Shayne Bowman, Ellen Kampinsky and Chris Willis’ “Amazoning the News.” [↩]

For me, the central miracle of the metropolitan daily newspaper is this: every single day, the organization sends hundreds of people into the city to perform the task of gathering and distilling information about that city. I just find that remarkable. These agents collect a mind-boggling amount of information, a fraction of which makes its way into the paper on any given day.

Indulge me for a moment in a semi-metaphorical interpretation of our publishing process.

[geek]

To make a newspaper, editors apply a massive set of filters to that mountain of information each day. First they ask, “What do we know today that we didn’t know yesterday?” That weeds out all but a thin stream of info. They then sort the resulting subset of information in descending order of importance and interestingness. (The importance/interestingness variable – what we call “news judgment” – is the trickiest factor in the equation.) They compile the items from the top of that sort into the next day’s front page, and then perform two cascading sorts: first by topic, then by importance and interestingness. The result is what gets dropped onto your driveway each morning.

We’re told daily that information is now cheaper than air. In this respect, newspapers have been way ahead of the curve, because they have been discarding heaps of information daily for decades. Because the very first filter we apply to our information (“what do we know today that we didn’t know yesterday?”) places a premium on recency over everything else (topic, importance, interestingness), even the information we publish is encoded into a format (the “article”) that degrades almost instantly in value.

I argue that we should evolve this process in a few key ways:

• Make much more of our information available. We’ve started this process, by creating blogs and other spaces online where we can publish stories that don’t fit into the print newshole. We need to expand the process. Make sure the observations jotted into reporters’ notebooks make it into beat-specific blogs. And for goodness’ sake, open the archives.
• Encode that information in formats with more longevity. A Wikipedia article is an excellent example of a format that holds information well over time. Database visualizations are another excellent example.
• Make more and different filters available to our audience (or to editors) to process the information. The “what do we know today that we didn’t know yesterday” filter is great, but I’d love to have access to that importance filter, unconstricted by any time frame.

One way of looking at the journalism industry is that it makes information valuable by applying sophisticated filters to it. We have the capacity to do much more of that.

[/geek]

Just kidding. I am never really going to close the geek tag.

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.

Many people use the terms “news” and “journalism” interchangeably. But what is news? I think most folks would say it means what’s new, accounts of the latest developments affecting some corner of the world.

Until recently, newspaper editors defined news as “important developments over the past 24 hours.” Editors of newsmagazines might expand that time horizon by a few days; Web editors will contract it to within a few hours. But there’s no escaping the time-bounded nature of “news.”

My understanding of journalism is broader. To me, journalism is the constant effort to deliver a truer picture of the world as it is. The “latest developments” provide one lens through which to capture that picture. And as long as journalism was primarily delivered by static media, that lens made perfect sense.

The Web, however, makes possible other ways of delivering that picture of our evolving world. It allows us to shirk the tyranny of recency and place more emphasis on context – the information that often gets buried beneath the news.

The title of this blog is a provocative misnomer. I don’t think news is going anywhere anytime soon, and I certainly think it remains a useful way of hooking our attention into the context surrounding the latest developments. But I do want to end the headlock news has placed on journalism. For all our handwringing and speculation, our conferences, our books, etc., news is as old as humanity and will survive us all. What ails in journalism – and what we have the opportunity to fix – is context.

I want to hear much, much less about the future of news, and much more about the future of context. I want to shift the focus of our books and conferences from how we’ll deliver the latest developments to how we’ll help our audiences better understand the state of our world.

For the next nine months, I’ll be at the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri, attempting to lay out a vision of a news website centered around context rather than time. I’ll be blogging my explorations and discoveries here, and welcoming your insights. Journalism has a moment of great opportunity before it. Let’s figure out how to rise to the occasion.