The Newsroom’s Information Surplus
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.
Related posts:
- Blast from the past: “Neo in the Newsroom” David Cohn has started a fun conversation on the idea...
- The newsroom: where alternate workflows go to die Martin Langeveld has written up a great description of how...
So one question I have is — how many of these considerations are medium-specific?
Obviously, the filter/sort function of the daily newspaper is driven to a large extent by its material form and production schedule.
But news-covering blogs and television, too, get sucked into the relentless linear pull of time.
Even though you have tags and archives or containers that effect a different sorting criteria, you could argue that the architecture of the traditional single-column blog or 24-hour news channel is even *less* sophisticated than the mechanisms of the newspaper, despite (or because of?) their greater ability to revise or react to events as they happen.
Wikipedia for the most part is not like this. It changes and adapts and expands over time, which is its virtue relative to the print encyclopedia, but it is also relatively stable and achronological — its virtue relative to the ephemeral web — and driven primarily by interestingness, not chronology (or even importance).
Ideally, a news web site *could* use the tools of the blog and the wiki to address the problem of timeliness and interestingness — and focus their editorial energy on importance. I’m thinking of a web site that might mix aspects of a magazine with a blog with a community portal, etc…
Tim
19 Sep 08 at 9:35 pm
Tim-
"I just want to add the Print piece to your very reasonable model. You discuss "…Ideally, a news web site *could* use the tools of the blog and the wiki to address the problem of timeliness and interestingness — and focus their editorial energy on importance."
Ideally, the content of Print should be determined, NOT on a calendar schedule, but a news event schedule. The Product is still delivered on a regular schedule. But the editorial gives up chasing the "breaking news". A sometimes undervalued feature of breaking news is that it creates focus for a moment. If journalists had 24/7 access to a wikipedia type site, focused on the local region, it should make it a lot easier for them to "get the right information, to the right person at the right time in the right form."
It seems to deal with the fact that "general interest" news is best delivered by groups forming on the web and Search.
Michael Josefowicz
23 Jan 09 at 1:33 pm
Tim-
"I just want to add the Print piece to your very reasonable model.
You say "…Ideally, a news web site *could* use the tools of the blog and the wiki to address the problem of timeliness and interestingness — and focus their editorial energy on importance."
Ideally the content in Print should be determined, NOT on a calendar schedule, but a news event schedule. The Product is still delivered on a regular schedule. But editorial gives up chasing the "breaking news".
A sometimes undervalued feature of breaking news is that it creates focus . . for a moment. If journalists had 24/7 access to a wikipedia type site, focused on the local region and it's many ongoing stories, it should make it a lot easier to write the story that will "get the right information, to the right person at the right time in the right form."
It might be the way to deal with the fact that "general interest" news is best delivered by groups forming on the web and Search.
Michael Josefowicz
23 Jan 09 at 1:36 pm