Newsless.org

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.

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