Newsless.org

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.

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