Newsless.org

^ Just in case anyone accuses me of not alliterating enough.

Today, approx. 40 years after the rest of the Web figured out how to do good discussions, general-interest news site comment threads mostly remain abysmal. On their best days. They are also the biggest thorn in the side of many an editor.

Many have enumerated where news site discussions often go the way of the suck (including, most helpfully, Derek Powazek):

• Anonymous posting.
• Non-threaded discussions.
• No newsroom participation.
• Forum ghettos.
• Hot-button issues.
• No reputation/ranking/filtering.

Folks are having thoughtful conversations about whether general-interest news can even support communities. I think they can. I’d argue that most of the problems identified above are symptoms of a single underlying affliction: News sites lack persistent, manageable points of focus around which communities can coalesce.

The best communities online all have the feeling of a semi-exclusive club. They cohere around distinctive goals, topics or personalities; they acquire in-jokes, shorthand, traditions; they’re open to newcomers, but oldtimers command respect. They sometimes sprout, like sidewalk grass, in the unlikeliest places, but often grow to resemble each other.

Most online editors have a fond story to tell about a close-knit community that sprung up improbably in a poorly-tended ’90s-era bulletin board in some abandoned crevice of their site. Or a popular blog with a good crowd of commenters.

But ask about the discussions in the news sections and their features will darken, their voices will coarsen, and you’ll be treated to a spittle-flecked recounting of racist rants, libelous tirades, comments mocking murder victims, and the like. The Internet’s id is not a pretty thing, and news story comments are its cavern.

News comments resemble graffiti more than discourse. Largely anonymous taggers come by and leave their marks. Sometimes their work is in response to another tagger, but most often, it’s a subtle variation on “I was here.” Like graffiti, comments are sometimes brilliant, but more frequently are garish and crude.

Unlike Gawker, I think we can fix comments. It is possible to have phenomenal discussions online. Even on general-interest news sites. In the course of my research, I’m considering some of the problems and mulling how my model might offer potential solutions. Derek Powazek’s contribution on this front was fantastic. I’d like to extend his thinking in a couple directions. Here’s what I got so far. Read the rest of this entry »

A bold argument: 2008 summoned the best overall election coverage I’ve ever seen.¹ That is, the nature of our current information ecoystem — a rapidly maturing blogosphere, large news organizations working to adapt, the mainstreaming of participation on the Web — brought about a dramatic step forward in election coverage this year.

Name a type of coverage or commentary citizens look for in an election year, and I bet I can make a case that it was done far better this cycle than in the recent past. Let’s walk through a few examples: Read the rest of this entry »

1. Granted, that’s not an enormous sample size. Also, although it may seem like it, I’m not actually contradicting my last post, which made the point that the coverage was incapable of matching the storytelling opportunity presented by the events of this year. That’s still true. [↩]

I’ve written a lot here about evolving journalism to enable it to tell larger stories. But how on earth do we tell the story of a year like this? This is a question I have no answer for.

The dominant story today is of course a narrative about race in America. A black man has been elected to lead a nation where just 40 years ago, you could be murdered for registering blacks to vote. It would be difficult enough to do justice to that story.

But race is only a segment of a deeply complex fractal of stories that emerged this year. And I find the greatest human pathos of the story of 2008 in the folds of that fractal, where the stories of race, class, sex, sexuality, gender, and generations intersect. If you’d frozen any moment of this year and traced the connections between the characters and incidents splashed on every front page, you’d have the setting for a drama as engrossing as any set to page or screen this year:

• Jeremiah Wright and Hillary Clinton, each seemingly convinced that America is not ready for a black President, both seem to try all they can to prove that conviction right.
• As Bill Clinton struggles to uplift his wife to office and thereby grasp some glimmer of redemption, John Edwards and Elliot Spitzer each re-enact his stunning fall from grace.
• John McCain, whose immense estate has brought him unending pressure in a populist year, pins his hopes on a working-class Everyman and an accomplished PTA mom from Alaska.
• As voters in California elect Barack Obama, who was born to a marriage which was then illegal in some states, they also amend their state constitution to prevent gays and lesbians from getting married.
• Chicago in 2008 finds itself caricatured as a den of anarchists and terrorists, summoning the ghosts of 40 years prior.
  

Even the minor characters in these dramas could have come straight out of Shakespeare’s head. People like Patty Solis-Doyle, Ashley Todd, Todd Palin, Bill Ayers, and Elizabeth Edwards all emerge from the year with fascinating stories to tell.

It feels important to me that these intersecting stories be told. I think 2008 has quite a lot to teach us. But I have no idea what shape that story could take.

All that said, though, I think the story’s power lies in the links. And I imagine the answer to my question will involve the link as well.

This isn’t really about context or journalism. I spent a couple hours after Obama’s victory speech grabbing full screenshots of a bunch of websites. My little piece of history.

I got a good question last week from a grad student here at Mizzou. I thought the question and my response were worth sharing. First, the question:

I had an interesting interview with a Chemistry professor this morning.  … He thinks the Missourian, and media in general, don’t write enough stories about science.  As a Chemistry professor, he thinks the general public should hear more about the work that he does and the importance of it.  On the other hand, you can’t write a headline that says “Chemistry professor will cure cancer” since it’s not necessarily true.  He’s certainly not a fan of media “hype.”  Would producing a context-rich website include writing stories about topics we don’t usually cover, like the confusing world of chemistry, or would it simply be aimed at giving more context to the subjects we often cover?  Is “context” topic-specific, or are you looking to broaden the wide world of information that readers have access to?

My reply:

I think journalists’ inability and unwillingness to cover science properly is a huge blind spot to the profession, caused by a couple of systemic incompatibilities between the science world and journalism as it’s practiced.

I would also say that not enough science coverage is a big problem, but woefully inaccurate science coverage might be an even bigger problem. Many journalists covering science aren’t thoroughly steeped in the sciences. Even at papers like the NY Times, which might do more science coverage than any other general-interest periodical in the country, the science reporters are usually dilettantes, not specialists. I don’t think my research would do much to help that problem, except to the extent that I’m advocating for the greater involvement of non-journalists (including scientists) in journalism.

And yes, I think focusing journalism more squarely on context would help overcome the problems, although the lack of context is only part of the issue. Journalism today is built around news events – that is, discrete, high-profile occurrences. Science is essentially built around the opposite of news events – the slow, steady, procedural accumulation and refinement of knowledge.

Even still, we miss opportunities to tie science information in when news events warrant it. For example, until recently, Sarah Palin’s stump speech contained a dig about how the government wastes money on such nonsense as researching the DNA of fruit flies. Scientists howled in fury – fruit flies are considered excellent research subjects because they reproduce so much and share a good proportion of their DNA with humans. It was a teachable moment that most reporters didn’t touch.

More salient to my research, I think, is the notion that focusing on the context behind the news enables journalism to tell larger, more complex stories. I think that will inevitably mean connecting those stories to science, in many cases. So much of science relates to the stuff of daily life – language, money, nutrition, health, technology, relationships, transportation, you-name-it. Cover crime deeply enough, and you’ll end up studying sociology, psychology, anthropology, neuroscience, and probably epidemiology. And my research is all about the continual deepening and expansion of the product of journalism.

Your thoughts?