Ten questions for journalists in the era of overload
I promised RJI’s communications director that I’d put together material for an e-mail that might be useful for the Institute’s mailing list. If you’re a regular reader, you’ll recognize many of these thoughts from my posts here, but you might still find this interesting. Happy 2009, and thanks for reading!
In the conversations about the seismic shifts rocking journalism today, much has been said about community participation in journalism, the proliferation of multimedia storytelling formats, the rise of mobile platforms and the departure of traditional advertising vehicles. Less has been said about how these developments relate to another fundamental shift in the landscape — our society’s 180-degree reversal from being starved of information to being drowned in it. But now that study after study has reinforced this fact, news industry leaders are starting to wrap their minds around adapting journalism to the overload age.
Addressing overload — weaving a mess of disconnected headlines into a coherent, compelling structure — is one of the basic premises of my work at RJI. In the inaugural entry on Newsless.org, I put it this way: “I want to hear much, much less about the future of news, and much more about the future of context. I want to shift the focus of our books and conferences from how we’ll deliver the latest developments to how we’ll help our audiences better understand the state of our world.”
As we engineer our experiment in delivering context, we’ve been asking ourselves a lot of questions to help focus our efforts. I thought I’d share some of them and invite your comments, challenges, footnotes and annexations:
1. Are we making our community feel better-informed or merely distracted?
By now we know the shocking truth: Seeing a ton of headlines on a news site makes many media consumers feel overwhelmed, not more plugged-in. On every page of my site, I want my visitors to think, “I can manage this.” And, “I want to know more about this.”
This means the layout and design of the page should communicate a clear hierarchy of information. It means the site should invite visitors with concise, high-level knowledge about topics that are relevant to them, and allow them to dive deep into the details wherever they choose. And it means we need to be very deliberate with our choices about what to present up front — I’d like to get out of the business of just shoveling up headlines to keep people clicking.
MORE READING: “What young people don’t like about the Web” (Nieman Reports, Winter ‘08)
2. How important is this for our community to know and why?
Editors supposedly ask themselves this question all the time, but the mix of headlines on most news sites still seems to be driven by immediacy more than importance. This is rational behavior — ephemeral stories often get pageviews, and more pageviews means more inventory to sell.
But that traffic is cheap, especially in a local context. That’s one-night-stand traffic. I want a relationship with my visitors. I want commitment. If I can hook them into a story that will continue to have meaning in their lives in a year or five years, I’ve created real — and rare — value.
More works of journalism should justify their existence with a more-or-less explicit declaration of why they matter. Not only to make the case to an audience, but to force journalists to think about it.
MORE READING: “The attention deficit — the need for timeless journalism” (Snarkmarket, 8/07)
3. Are we chasing the larger story, or just the latest story?
Yesterday’s news cycle was all about filling the news hole — finding anything especially interesting that happened in a particular window of time and throwing it onto a page or into a broadcast. Freed from contraints of time and space, tomorrow’s news cycle should be about advancing our most important stories — reporting new developments, of course, but also exploring different angles and drawing connections.
When we’ve done enough reporting to determine the patterns that connect news events together, our goal should be to bring those patterns into relief — responsive but not restricted to the latest events. The larger story is the more important story to tell. In figuring out how to structure our stories and prioritize our reporting, we start at the top — tell the larger story — and work down.
MORE READING: “It all bubbles up” (Newsless.org, 9/08)
4. Are we synthesizing information, or merely aggregating it?
News sites have mostly gotten over their early phobia of linking out to other sites. And they’ve started to recognize that a collection of links on a topic can be just as valuable as another article about it. But many of these link collections are just glorified search engine results, haphazard and sprawling, driven by complex but ineffective algorithms.
Proper curation requires synthesis. It requires giving links thoughtful placement and descriptive summaries. In most cases, links should complement (not duplicate) each other.
Most of today’s algorithms still struggle to do all this well, which isn’t to say that algorithmic approaches are always wrong. Gabe Rivera’s meme aggregators Techmeme and Memeorandum, for example, perform very useful functions that humans would struggle to match. Human approaches can be difficult to scale. But even Rivera’s machines are being augmented by people. And I’d rather have a select few truly useful topic pages than thousands of pages of noise.
MORE READING: “‘Curation,’ and journalists as curators” (Mindy McAdams, 12/08)
5. How are we serving those who know [nothing | a lot] about the topic?
For newcomers to a topic, I want to provide an easily digestible overview. For experts, I want a full crowd-sourcing operation under the hood with vibrant conversations and comprehensive databases. I want to guide newcomers towards expert knowledge on any topic they’d like to explore, but my primary concern is that they understand the basic context of matters important to them.
To be clear, my goal is to turn as many newcomers as I can into experts on as many topics as I can, but I think I can only get there by treating the two audiences distinctly and creating a continuum between them.
MORE READING: “National Explainer: A job for journalists on the demand side of news” (PressThink, 8/08)
6. Have we provided a clear trail through our coverage?
One of the most brilliant characteristics of the Web is its ability to handle non-linear stories. Hyperlinks permit a form of discursive storytelling that beautifully mimics the free-flowing chaos of reality and human thought. But linearity has its value, especially when our goal is to foster basic understanding.
A big part of feeling overloaded is feeling lost in a thicket of information. We tend to think about navigation only in the context of an entire site (e.g. getting visitors from the home page to articles). We need to provide clear navigation within and between topics. If a visitor finds herself suddenly in the midst of our coverage on a topic — having jumped, for example, from a search result to a blog post — she should be able to find her way to a beginning, or to another stepping stone of information. We should carefully consider how we use sign posts such as timelines, maps, breadcrumbs and tables of content.
MORE READING: “Where am I?” (A List Apart, 8/06)
7. Are we using 1,000 words where a picture should be?
The ability of photos, sounds and graphics to illustrate what words cannot convey is beyond dispute. But we often approach multimedia storytelling as a world unto itself, rather than employing a range of techniques to effectively and efficiently tell a coherent story. We boast about the number of videos we publish each day, but often miss opportunities to use a video to save our visitors a few hundred words of lifeless prose.
For a topic that requires an understanding of the layout of a neighborhood, we should use a map. If a visual reference is appropriate, we should use a graphic. We should shift our focus from merely producing more multimedia to integrating more effective multimedia.
MORE READING: “Rethinking the Multimedia Experience” (Poynter Online, 11/05)
8. How good are our filters?
“There is no such thing as information overload, there is only filter failure,” says Clay Shirky. Whether or not you agree with that sweeping statement, chances are you’ve encountered filter failure on a news website, probably when using the search engine. Despite the big bucks many news organizations have paid for enterprise search technology, I use Google to search most news sites. Could the resources we spend on search go into developing more effective filters elsewhere?
I want to arm visitors with good tools for filtering the information we present. In discussions, for example, ranking and reputation filters can help locate high-quality contributions quickly. Time, tagging and taxonomies can all become the foundations for excellent filters. The more information we provide, the better filters we require.
MORE READING: “The newsroom’s information surplus” (Newsless.org, 9/08)
9. Will our coverage find its audience where and when they’re ready for it?
“If the news is that important, it will find me,” said a college student in a focus group. Given that expectation, how does our coverage fare?
It’s unrealistic, of course, to expect that every topic we consider important will reach everyone we think it should. But by transparently focusing our attention and effort on those stories we consider most important, and by continuing to advance those stories over time rather than falling prey to the “we-covered-it” syndrome, we make it likelier that those stories will be found.
Asking this question also prods us to consider whether we’re engaging communities where they live, rather than simply expecting them to come to us. Are we tapped into the online and offline hubs where members of our target communities spend their time? Have we struck up dialogue with bloggers covering related topics?
MORE READING: “The secret to a successful online guerilla marketing campaign?” (Online Journalism Review, 10/08)
10. How are we managing our own info overload?
As we explore how information overload affects media consumption habits, we shouldn’t neglect its effects on our reporting techniques. Journalists in the era of overload have to be masters of information management. We need to learn to distill massive amounts of data and hone our pattern recognition skills. We have to figure out how to stay up-to-speed in a world of e-mail inboxes, document dumps, comment threads, Twitter streams, RSS feeds and online bulletin boards.
The bright side in all this is that if we’re doing this right, if we’re providing a valuable service to a focused community, we can enlist that community to help us manage this flood. They’ll help us pore through the documents, call our attention to significant developments, leak information from closed-off places and help identify patterns. In the overload era, our crowd is easily the best tool we’ve got at our disposal.
MORE READING: “The press’ new paradigm” (Snarkmarket, 6/06); “Why I’m beatblogging” (By Daniel Victor, 3/08)
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Great post Matt, I just found your blog via @ryansholin – Question 9 is one that really resonates for me. I think many journalists making the transition from old media to new media still have a ways to go in understanding how to engage the community and interact where they are. Working with local bloggers is a good step.
yes, again, great post
shawn smith
31 Dec 08 at 7:24 am
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Notes from a Teacher - Wednesday squibs
31 Dec 08 at 2:16 pm
Matt -
You are hitting on exactly the issues we have been trying to address as we create C3, the Complete Community Connection.
My latest post explores the context issues in an era of information overload at http://cpetersia.wordpress.com/2008/12/21/relationship-attention-x-trust/
I look forward to comparing notes as we progress.
Chuck
Chuck Peters
1 Jan 09 at 5:06 am
[...] e de rapidez na transmissáo de notícias como o que estamos. A reflexáo apresentada no post Ten questions for journalists in the era of overload, do blog Newsless.org é extremamente pertinente. Pensamos o jornalismo? Consideramos sua [...]
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21 Apr 09 at 12:11 am
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4 Oct 09 at 3:18 pm
To your point, Rex Hammock’s post about Wikipedia.
http://www.rexblog.com/2009/09/30/20010
“Most major news-oriented websites have spent years trying to replicate online what story-telling is in print or broadcast. Even blogs do that.
“During that same time, Wikipedia has shown us a different way — perhaps one that points to a better way for the web.
“I promise: There’s so much more to Wikipedia than you can ever imagine.”
I realize these are not journalists posting to the wiki… but why can’t journalists post to the wiki?
A rich, linked, living wiki managed by an editor can achieve most of the goals above. Just need someone to make it more navigable, someone to make it more shareable… someone to take it to the next level. About.com tries to do this, Times Topics tries to do this…. So the models are there.
And if someone can figure out what to do with reader’s comments – incorporate them but somehow weed out the wackos – even better.
(Wait. Am I being a wacko?)
Monica Williams
5 Oct 09 at 2:29 pm
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