Newsless.org

Jeff Jarvis is on board. So on board, in fact, he’s practically in the tank. Before you read his post, you should know that I neither paid him nor possessed him. A taste:

The story was all we had before — it’s what would fit onto a newspaper page or into a broadcast show. But a discrete and serial series of articles over days cannot adequately cover the complex stories going on now nor can they properly inform the public. There’s too much repetition. Too little explanation. The knowledge is not cumulative. Each instance is necessarily shallow. And when more big stories come — as they have lately! — in scarce time and space and with scarce resources, each becomes even shallower. We never catch up, we never get smarter. Articles perpetuate a Ground Hog Day kind of journalism. [Cf. "The article is not the story," 9/23]…

I want a page, a site, a thing that is created, curated, edited, and discussed. It’s a blog that treats a topic as an ongoing and cumulative process of learning, digging, correcting, asking, answering. It’s also a wiki that keeps a snapshot of the latest knowledge and background. It’s an aggregator that provides annotated links to experts, coverage, opinion, perspective, source material. It’s a discussion that doesn’t just blather but that tries to accomplish something (an extension of an article like this one that asks what options there are to bailout a bailout). It’s collaborative and distributed and open but organized.

Think of it as being inside a beat reporter’s head, while also sitting at a table with all the experts who inform that reporter, as everyone there can hear and answer questions asked from the rest of the room — and in front of them all are links to more and ever-better information and understanding. [Cf. "Give a reporter five minutes," 9/8] …

What do we call it? I don’t know. The topic table. The beat bliki (ouch).¹ The news brain. We’ll know what to call it when we see it. [Cf. "What is Wikipedia?: Or, the 1991 problem," 9/18]

If you’re wondering why I’ve been so zealous in tracking these likeminded expressions, it’s because I think we’re on the verge of an epochal advancement in journalism. We’ve spoken for years about the radical evolution that must take place, but I think our ideas are only now matching our ambitions. In recent years, our craft has gotten quicker and glitzier and slightly more in touch, but all our progress has been incremental. Now, the paradigm shift is finally at hand. A few months ago, Malcolm Gladwell popularized this notion that great insights very often strike a number of people seemingly at once. He said:

This phenomenon of simultaneous discovery—what science historians call “multiples”—turns out to be extremely common. One of the first comprehensive lists of multiples was put together by William Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas, in 1922, and they found a hundred and forty-eight major scientific discoveries that fit the multiple pattern. Newton and Leibniz both discovered calculus. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace both discovered evolution. Three mathematicians “invented” decimal fractions. Oxygen was discovered by Joseph Priestley, in Wiltshire, in 1774, and by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, in Uppsala, a year earlier. Color photography was invented at the same time by Charles Cros and by Louis Ducos du Hauron, in France. Logarithms were invented by John Napier and Henry Briggs in Britain, and by Joost Bürgi in Switzerland.

Many smart people are coming to the same conclusion about what the shape of journalism should be. The reason the consensus tag dwarfs any other here on Newsless is that I want to pluck this pattern from the zeitgeist. In my research proposal, I said:

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.

Part of what I meant by that last bit was what Jeff says here: “I think the new building block of journalism needs to be the topic. I don’t mean that in the context of news site topic pages, which are just catalogues of links built to kiss up to Google SEO. Those are merely collections of articles, and articles are inadequate.” Working in online news for the past several years has been a slow process of realizing that yes, articles are inadequate. At the Star Tribune, we spent months trying to move towards what the New York Times has done with Times Topics. Vendors courted us by the bucketful, promising to do the same thing using sophisticated algorithms.² We pursued this vision half-heartedly, but other priorities crowded it out. I think we realized (I know I had) that the topic pages — basically slightly flashier search results — were an uninspiring end-game. But nobody had articulated a better one. Now we’re starting to.

1. Incidentally, I was up late last night, lying in bed, searching Google from my cell phone for a Wordpress plugin that mimics the functionality of Wikipedia. (I’m still searching for the software framework that’ll house this prototype. More on that later.) One of the vaporware plugins that kept coming up was called … wait for it … blicki. [↩]
2. A commenter on Jeff’s post makes a point I’ve started making a lot in recent talks: part of the problem of articulating this vision is that we still think machines are going to do this for us. Somehow, we’ll just put the information out there, and some algorithm will pull it together beautifully. I’m now convinced that humans will play a much more hands-on role in this than we thought. [↩]

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