Newsless.org

• (SLIDE) First, let me ask you about Information Overload
  • “Stimulation Overload” might be a better term
  • (SLIDE) How many of you feel as though you’re overloaded with information?
  • OK, that was a gimme question. Stories about info overload have been low-hanging fruit for decades now.
  • (SLIDE) So a real question: for most of you, are news organizations helping or hurting that situation?
  • Raise hands: Helping? Hurting?
• This is a key premise: if you take nothing else away from this talk, understand this
  • (SLIDE) We have already shifted from a state of information scarcity to information overload
  • Today’s journalism is STILL structured around information scarcity
  • We talk about “filling the news hole”
  • Broadcasters talk about “localizing” news stories
    • (Not meant in the sense of making a national story more relevant to a local constituency, but essentially repeating a news story done elsewhere on a local scale)
• (SLIDE) One of the biggest organizing principles behind journalism as it’s practised today is TELLING MORE STORIES
  • We don’t actually NEED more stories
  • We don’t need journalists to tell us what happened at the city council meeting
  • We don’t need journalists to tell us the story of last night’s game
  • We don’t need journalists to speculate on who Obama’s cabinet is going to be
• (SLIDE) What we NEED is LARGER STORIES
  • We need someone to tell us what last night’s city council meeting means for us
  • Or what last night’s game means for our team
  • Or what Obama’s cabinet choices mean for our country
• For the past however-many decades, our goal has been to find more things each day for everybody to worry about
  • When I load up a news website, or watch a broadcast, more often than not what I see is news - a new headline, a new phenomenon, a new crime or crash or spectacle
  • This is actually debilitating
  • The net effect is that whenever I encounter “the news” these days, I feel LESS informed, not MORE so
• (SLIDE) And it’s not just me
  • This quote is from an AP study published earlier this year, where they followed a bunch of young consumers and tracked their information consumption habits
  • “The abundance of news and ubiquity of choice do not necessarily translate into a better news environment for consumers. … Participants in this study showed signs of news fatigue; that is, they appeared debilitated by information overload and unsatisfying news experiences. … Ultimately news fatigue brought many of the participants to a learned helplessness response. The more overwhelmed or unsatisfied they were, the less effort they were willing to put in.”
  • We wring our hands a lot about young folks turning away from the news
  • This is an utterly rational reaction to the information environment they’re in
  • When reading the news consistently makes you feel less informed and less empowered, why on earth would you do it?
  • Especially when your infosphere is saturated with information that is (1) more focused, (2) more immediate, and (3) more graspable
  • Many of us have all but given up on the notion that following the news can make us more informed
  • Now we tune into the news for a slice of life, a diverting story, something interesting
• Once again, this is an opportunity
  • What me and others like me lack, in large part, is UNDERSTANDING
  • What *should* we be concerned about, and how can we turn those concerns into action
  • (SLIDE) I want to hear much, much less about the future of news and much more about the future of UNDERSTANDING
  • That is the single largest opportunity my project aims to address

• (SLIDE) So let’s talk in practical terms about current approaches to online journalism
• I want to contrast how journalism looks now, to how I hope it will look when I’m done with this research
• (SLIDE) I’m going to use a local story as a case study
• Here’s the super-quick skinny on the Crosscreek story
  • (SLIDE) The Crosscreek Center is a new shopping development that just passed through City Council in August
  • After a year of really acrimonious meetings between developers and residents
  • As many local stories do, it unfolded bit by bit over the past year
  • Through City Council meetings and Planning & Zoning Commission meetings
  • And it exposed lots of issues with the city’s planning process
• If you’re a user of the Missourian’s website, this is how you’d typically encounter the Crosscreek story
  • (SLIDE) You come to the website, and maybe you see a headline like this
  • And maybe for whatever reason you click into the story and read the lede and the nut graf
  • OK, so maybe you’re interested, but you want to know more about this story
  • (SLIDE) Fortunately the Missourian has packaged together all sorts of related articles on Crosscreek
  • Except it’s kind of a lot of headlines, and you don’t know what to read first
  • And you also don’t want to read through a bunch of articles to figure out why this is on the front page of the Missourian website
  • Maybe you’ll have more luck with the search engine
  • The Missourian makes two search engines available, and here’s what they return
  • (SLIDE) Seriously?? Lots more headlines? Who has time to read through all this? Lame! I’m outta here
• (SLIDE) For an info consumer like me, is this experience ideal?
• Why or why not?
• (SLIDE) OK, here’s what I’d say:
  • First off, it would require quite a bit of work for me to piece together the larger story here
  • All I know is that some proposal out on Stadium and 63 was tabled
  • And I’m left with no idea where it goes from here
  • When should I tune back in if I want to know more?
  • Mostly, how does this affect *me*? Why is this valuable for me to know?
  • This approach leaves me with more questions, rather than answering my questions
• I’m not picking on the Missourian here
  • Most news sites struggle with similar issues
  • The news site I’ve seen that’s putting in the best effort on tackling this is the NY Times
• How many of you have seen Times Topics?
  • Since they haven’t covered the Crosscreek story, I’m going to use the auto industry bailout as an example
  • They seem to have put a lot of work into this
  • They’ve got the latest developments
  • But they also have a lengthy writeup explaining the history and current status of the topic
  • And they’re doing this for pretty much every story they cover, from the bailout to Blagojevich
• I definitely think the Times coverage is a step in the right direction, but it still leaves me with some problems
• (SLIDE) First, it still requires a lot of work for me to grasp the story
  • Many topics have a basic writeup, but then just a giant list of headlines to get the full overview of the story
  • I need hierarchy, I need synthesis
  • And I want to know how this relates to other stories
  • Don’t just give me links to “related topics,” tell me how they relate!
• So those are the issues I’m considering with my approach
  • DISCLAIMER: What you’re about to see is still hypothetical
  • I’ve got a lot more work to do before I can do this for real

MY APPROACH

• (SLIDE) But here’s what I’m working with so far
  • The focus of the Crosscreek story is a synthesized overview
  • Like a Wikipedia article, replete with actual links to other pieces of the story, and other related stories
  • Being actual links, they give you some sense of how stories relate
  • The latest developments appear as a blog on the story page, so we handle the “what’s new” function
  • The overview is updated as developments emerge, like a Wikipedia article
  • As well as welcoming discussion on each of the blog posts, we also invite discussion on the topic itself
  • One of the main overarching goals is to make it much easier to tell how this story relates to something larger
    • In this case, Columbia’s planning process and the vision for the city’s future
• (SLIDE) The hard part about presenting a project like this is that execution is key
  • I expect that we’ll get a lot wrong during this go-round
  • My biggest hope is that we succeed, but if we fail, we fail well
  • That we learn interesting lessons about how this approach can be refined

CONSEQUENCES

• (SLIDE) If we do succeed, here’s what I expect will be some of the outcomes
• I’m going to start with the practical and ease on up to the theoretical
• (SLIDE) First, by treating stories as topics that evolve over time, we will have created places where stable communities could hypothetically flourish
  • That’s not all that’s required, of course
  • Good online communities become likelier if you have
    • Clear authorities and personalities to guide discussion and set the tone
    • Good technology that allows for threaded discussions and comment rating
  • But having communities based around topics makes it at least possible for communities to arise
• (SLIDE) This may seem crass, but it’s important: Search engine optimization
  • In many ways, SEO is just a jargon-y term for making the Web better
  • Better-organized, more deeply interlinked
  • This approach should help us arrive at a point where when people Google “Crosscreek Center,” what they see is the Missourian’s synthesis of the subject
• (SLIDE) By using two endlessly fluid information formats - wikis and blogs - we will be much more able to adapt to the pace of reality
  • Twice now the NY Times has written about how Wikipedia seems to function as well for capturing breaking news as it does for synthesizing longer-term information
  • Whether a story breaks or oozes, we can track it accordingly
• (SLIDE) Not every story relates to me, and that’s fine
  • Different information becomes relevant at different points
  • Talk about 35W and gusset plates
  • Sometimes a breaking news event is a hook into a larger story
  • Or we learn something that makes us interested in a story we’d never considered before
  • If I’m driving past Stadium and 63 and I wonder, “What’s that thing they’re building?” this approach makes it much likelier that I can easily satisfy my curiosity
• (SLIDE) This is one of the most important potential consequences of this approach
  • If we do this right, when you come to the website we create, you will actually begin to feel *more informed* rather than merely ambiently aware
  • You’ll have some sense of how to prioritize the information we present
  • While you can dig as deep as you want, you can also gain a quick understanding of a range of topics
  • We will have shifted from an info-scarcity model to an info-overload model, and the benefits should be clearly apparent
• Finally, the word I’ve refrained from mentioning during this entire talk
  • (SLIDE) Context.
  • If we get this right, and again, it’s a big if …
  • We will constantly be advancing the important, universal stories that justify our work
  • Stories like, “What type of city is Columbia becoming?”
  • “How can I help to advance my community?”
  • “What is most important for me to understand?”
• The shift that I’m advocating here is a sort of fundamental reorganization of our mission:
  • Away from “filling a news hole”
  • Away from making our audiences ambiently aware
  • Away, really, from a focus on the latest news
• I summarize that re-formed mission this way:
  • (SLIDE) Don’t
  • (SLIDE) just
  • (SLIDE) tell
  • (SLIDE) MORE
  • (SLIDE) stories,
  • (SLIDE) tell
  • (SLIDE) LARGER stories.
• Questions?