Newsless.org

Wondering what happened to your Newsless RSS feed? It’s not just you. Migrating the feed from Feedburner to Google has caused all sorts of headaches for customers across the Web. The good news is I think most of my problems with the Newsless feed are fixed. Wherever you subscribe, it should be working again. Let me know if you’re still having troubles.

Also, if you pulled up Newsless last Wednesday, you might have seen a long string of short posts in Japanese. I’m still not sure exactly what happened, but I’m keeping an eye on it. Sorry about that, and thanks for following.

The other day’s post on following the news started up a meaty little discussion. I considered posting this in that thread, but my thoughts were coalescing into a post of their own, so here it is.

I think it’s worth quoting Bill Dunphy’s reply at length:

What you’re describing is, plain and simply, bad journalism. A failure to test critical assertions in an important ongoing public issue is simply a failure to do your job as a journalist. … The failure you’re pointing to, while common, has nothing to do with the medium really, or the concept of daily (or weekly) journalism. The failure is one of quality of work.

You don’t need a damn new taxonomy or community wiki. You just need a journalist who gives a damn, and editor who cares and a paper that earns enough money that they can employ otherwise non-revenue producing people like that.

Sadly we have been failing on the first two conditions for years – and decades – and now we’re failing on the third.

I hear a contradiction here, worth highlighting because I think it’s a common contradiction in our industry’s conversation with itself. On the one hand, Bill argues that these problems in coverage are particular to the situation, not systemic — a failure of individual journalists to do their jobs. On the other hand, Bill implies that the problems are, in fact, systemic — “we” are all agents of a decades-long, system-wide failure.

Part of the reason I don’t find the individual failure argument compelling is that I just don’t think it’s true. I’m working with these editors. One of the reporters involved in the coverage showed up in the earlier thread. They are as talented and dedicated a set of professionals as any I’ve seen.

Convene a jury of decorated editors and ask them to evaluate any of the coverage I read, and I think they’d say the stories were well-written on the whole, perspectives were typically well-balanced, and the reporting was tenacious. They’d be asking themselves, “How well did the newspapers cover that sewer issue?” And they’d be answering, as would I, “Pretty well.” By the standards of the system, it was good journalism.

What I’m saying is that I think those standards — the benchmarks of success systemic to journalism — are misguided. I’m asking broader questions, such as, “How well are we advancing the debate this community is having with itself?” And by those standards, the journalism fell far short.

Look at the current debate over the financial press’ coverage leading up to the economic meltdown, and you’ll find the exact same dynamic.¹ In this casting, the American Journalism Review plays the role of my hypothetical jury of editors. The magazine examined the work of the financial press and issued a resounding thumbs-up. Numerous stories warned of the dangers of subprime lending and collateralized debt obligations. Business journalists widely acknowledged the existence of a housing bubble. By these standards, the business press should be commended for having done excellent journalism.

I’ll leave the rebuttal to CJR:

But assembling a list of good stories strikes me as a little too simple. This isn’t about individuals, after all, but news organizations and the business press as an institution. Any fair measure of press performance will have to take some measure of the record in its entirety. What was the business-press narrative about, generally speaking? What else was written about Wall Street and the financial-services industry? Who was on the covers?

Were the good stories the rule or the exception that proves it?

Like me, CJR has broadened the questions, and like me, so far they seem to find the journalism wanting. On the individual level, reporters and editors were performing splendidly. The failure is in the system.

The sunny side to systemic failures is that they pave the way for systemic solutions. I actually believe the forms that have contained journalism — the article, the general-interest news product, the “24-hour news cycle” — have made it easier for these failures to occur. I believe our attention to scoops rather than synthesis and our preference for immediacy over importance weakens our journalism. I believe our unwillingness to facilitate our communities’ conversations beyond the occasional article weakens the impact of our journalism.

But I’m hopeful some of the forms that are emerging, such as wikis and blogs, begin to introduce a sort of purpose and flexibility that might make journalism fundamentally better. Of course you don’t need a wiki to provide context. But it presents a greater bias towards context than that 9-inch news hole that’s gotta get filled this afternoon.

1. A special hat tip here to Jay Rosen, who’s been calling my attention to this phenomenon a lot over the past few months. [↩]

Ken Burns spoke at the Star Tribune in 2007, just before the premiere of his documentary, The War. Although he didn’t say it explicitly, a surprising detail became clear during his presentation: what motivated him most in the creation of The War wasn’t the film itself, but the footage. Every day, he said, another wave of World War II veterans was passing on, each person a library¹ of insight on a drama that will reverberate long after all of us are gone, just after many of them had found their voice. When critics complained about the doc’s lengthy running time, they were missing the point. Burns’ edits, while careful, were an afterthought. The value had been in capturing the voices, not distilling them.

It might be maudlin, but I think about this as cities everywhere shed their longtime reporters. As I suggested early in the life of this blog, I think a news organization’s most valuable asset is the tremendous intellectual capital in its newsroom, the decades of knowledge about how the city works at a fundamental level. The past few years have seen a drastic depletion of this precious asset.

Thankfully, though, most of these reporters are still with us. And therein lies an opportunity.

Last fall, CJR ran a series of observations from departing journalists called “Parting Thoughts.” The essays were wistful, nostalgic, amusing, cathartic, sometimes angry, occasionally optimistic. It was a good idea, and I wonder if we could extend it.

I’d be tremendously curious to hear from these departing journalists a birds-eye-view of their beat. What were the most important developments they covered that even those readers who weren’t paying attention should be aware of? What from their beat should their community be keeping an eye on in the near future? What processes had they developed for covering the beat? Which stories had they always planned to do but never got around to? What advice would they give to anyone who wanted to pick up where they left off?

Unshackled from the need to be viewed as opinionless arbiters, ex-reporters might be able to give a more honest, probing, far-reaching assessment of their beats than they could while they were on the job. A collection of these interviews for every city would be a marvelous trove of knowledge, the beginnings of a stellar information asset. The interviews could be conducted by anyone — local bloggers, the reporter’s former colleagues, rival news orgs, Facebook friends.

Is this happening anywhere? If not, can someone try it?

If I get the time, I might just call up a few of my former colleagues myself.

1. His word. [↩]

I was never culturally habituated to the idea of a newspaper. Sure, I grew up with one around the house, but having come of age in the Internet era, the newspaper struck me as inert and disconnected. Unlike the Web, the paper was always shallow where I sought depth but nuanced where I sought conciseness.

But that doesn’t mean I’m not a print guy.

I faithfully and lovingly thumb through my magazine subscriptions — The New Yorker, Wired, Communication Arts — as they arrive. I am never not in the middle of a book, and I’m typically in the middle of three.¹ To date, my only contribution to Kevin Kelly’s wonderful Cool Tools newsletter has been my review of a device that assists me with hands-free book-reading during lunch. I’m a founding member of a book club that celebrates its third anniversary this month. As far as I’m concerned, the world of print can stay around for a good long time.

Michael Josefowicz has been commenting here prolifically over the past few days, describing the roles print could play in the model we’re exploring. I’m with you, Michael. The Politico model — build your reputation among a sizeable audience online, but build your revenue off a comparatively small subscriber base in print — is interesting to me. MinnPost tried something like this, and it didn’t exactly work. I suspect part of the problem there was that the print product was a general-interest news edition.

The sort of cumulative, long-lived, topic-based, deeply contextual sort of journalism I’m advocating seems less given to a daily newspaper format and more to a monthly or quarterly magazine format. Could a quarterly publication including synthesis of months of online coverage of, say, schools in a given locality find a small, but lucrative subscriber base of school administrators, teachers, parents and students? My roommate Mike Fancher told me his paper’s annual schools guide was a hit. Might other topics merit the same treatment? I’m not sure, but I’m very interested in the answer to that question.

1. Full disclosure: In the immediate future, it looks like most of my book purchases will be e-books. My Kindle feels like a device suspended between the digital and the analog world. It points towards a future where the boundaries between “print” and “online” are much murkier. [↩]

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been steeped in hundreds of pages of coverage of growth and development in Columbia, MO. The articles I’ve been reading came from the Columbia Missourian and the Columbia Daily Tribune; I read them in chronological order from 2001 to now.

I’m beginning to question an assumption I’ve never really articulated, but always held. I’ve long assumed that if you followed the news, the stories behind the headlines would become plain. By reading your newspaper over time, you’d develop a high-level understanding of the issues. You’d have an idea of the characters involved, the dilemmas at hand, the consensus facts, etc. You’ll be armed with the information you need to make decisions on how to advance your society.

But as I immerse myself in this coverage, I’m starting to suspect it’s not so. I’m taking the most linear approach possible to following the news: reading years of relevant stories strung end-to-end in order. I should be the Platonic ideal of the well-informed citizen. Yet many vital questions remain unanswered.

I can tell you the names, affiliations and positions of all the key players. I can cite a number of City Council ordinances and infrastructure financing studies. I’ve taken more than 30 pages of notes on my Kindle. But all this knowledge only amounts to an awareness of the events that have transpired in growth and development in Columbia. To feel truly and properly informed, I need to understand what these events mean. But I can’t tell you that at all.

For example, a dispute has long been simmering between developers who say they contribute a fair amount to the funds needed to support infrastructure in Columbia and a group of residents who say the developers aren’t pulling their weight. Developers claim their contributions match those of developers in other similar communities. The residents say the city shoulders an extraordinarily high share of the burden. Each side offers perfectly testable claims. But I have absolutely no idea where the balance of evidence falls.

Devil’s Advocate Matt: Maybe what you’re talking about is just bad journalism. If the reporters and editors were doing their jobs, you’d feel like a properly-informed citizen after all that reading. But your experience in this instance can’t really be generalized to the industry at large.

Perhaps, but I have a strong suspicion that the coverage in the Tribune and the Missourian meets all the standards by which we typically evaluate journalism. The individual articles balance the claims of advocates on all sides and bring in independent testimony where appropriate. At an article-by-article level, the papers do a perfectly respectable job of encapsulating the relevant context.

The real questions seep in at a higher level. Fundamental claims, positions and assumptions remain untested, persisting after all the city council ordinances and the bond elections. The consequences of the events in the headlines seem to go unexamined. Developers warn that if voters enact higher fees for development, it will suppress growth and the costs will be passed on to homeowners anyway. Did it happen? Did the warnings come true? I can’t tell you. I have a lingering host of questions like those.

I don’t think the reason the newspapers haven’t answered these questions is because they’re bad journalists. I think it’s chiefly because these questions are obscured by the scale of coverage. If we think of ourselves as covering a bond issue, we’ll focus mostly on how claims and counter-claims relate to that issue. When the voters decide the issue, our work is done. On the other hand, if we think of ourselves as covering how growth is financed, we’ll try to get to the bottom of that question. We just don’t tend to think of ourselves that way.

Devil’s Advocate Matt: Aren’t you applying greater expectations than journalism can fulfill? After all, sometimes the role of journalism isn’t to provide the answers, but to lay out the questions. At least now you know enough to ask the right questions. Besides, reality is too messy to be digested into info-nuggets. Your frustration just shows that the journalists have done a good job of capturing the knotty nature of the problems at hand.

OK, but that’s super-lame. I’m saying I put in all this effort to get more informed, but in the end I actually feel less informed. If that’s the case, why the heck should I follow the news? And how am I supposed to get the answers? Should I keep reading with a dim hope that all this information will spontaneously click together into knowledge? Keep in mind, I just digested eight years of coverage. If the end result is merely a greater understanding that all this stuff is complicated, I’m having trouble finding the value here.

After doing this reading, I am confident of a few things. One is that we are perfectly capable of distilling much of my reading into something more coherent and engaging without discarding too much valuable nuance. Another is that doing so will reveal all sorts of important questions we didn’t answer.

And these questions aren’t unanswerable philosophical dilemmas. They’re relatively straightforward, and they have perfectly concrete answers. It’s just that we haven’t pursued or supplied those answers, because we’ve concentrated our attention on smaller questions.

Devil’s Advocate Matt: When you throw around phrases such as “high-level understanding” and statements such as “I need to know what these events mean,” don’t you worry that you’re asking reporters to artificially impose a conceptual frame onto a reality that might not merit it? How can you be sure you’re not just forcing events to conform to your agenda, or cherry-picking events that suit the framework you’ve laid out?

Two points. First, not to rehash the myth of objectivity, but I don’t buy that there isn’t already a conceptual frame at work here. Our mental models determine how stories get covered and how much, who we talk to, what information we include and exclude. There are reasons we think the stuff we select is important. I think we stand to gain a lot by articulating those models explicitly.

Second, it takes a lot of reporting to deliver what I’d call a “high-level understanding” of any issue. I can confidently conclude from my reading that common themes and questions have continued popping up over the past several years in Columbia, and that these themes and questions are important, and that we can weave interesting stories out of them. My talks with editors at the Missourian reinforce these conclusions. I don’t think that distilling the news for an audience that can’t be as engaged as we are diminishes our reporting in any way; in fact, I think it makes our reporting much more valuable.

The question that titles this post is purposely provocative. I can rattle off any number of issues for which I feel my understanding’s been enhanced because I load up the New York Times every day. Yes, on some level, following the news works. I want to make it work better, on a bigger level.

Kevin Kelleher at GigaOm interviewed me yesterday for a good column hitting a few key topics. He zeroed in on something I’ve said before, and I think it’s worth reframing and reiterating. Kelleher quotes me as saying, “When you ask, ‘How do you support news organizations on the web?’ it looks completely daunting. But many successful journalistic enterprises on the web started out the other way. You had a few individuals creating enough value to be supported, and then building on that value.”¹

Conversations about the business model for news online still tend to take place at the organization level. That is, we keep asking how we’re going to support this organization that gathers the news. E.g. What would be the CPM/audience size necessary to sustain a $63 million annual budget? Framed that way, the task is clearly Sisyphean. You wind up with analyses that assert that news Web sites require audiences of at least 200MM pageviews each month to generate sustainable revenue.

When we break the newspaper down into its hundreds of component parts and build up, a different picture emerges. What size community might you need to build online to support a team of investigative journalists? You can start with 61,000 visitors. Now how many of those visitors can you convert into True Fans?

That’s how we’ll build sustainable coverage online. Investigating each of the functions the news organization used to (or neglected to) perform, and finding out how that function might be supported.

1. I’m certain this is a delightfully polished-up version of whatever I said. I may have started ranting about video games between some of those sentences. I don’t think I ever express a thought that coherently. Nonetheless, it totally captured what I meant. Thanks, Kevin. [↩]

It sounds jargon-y, but there aren’t too many ways to make this pop. If you haven’t noticed, I’m all about the systematic accumulation of knowledge. I think it’s something the Web does really, really well.

Of course, my research project concerns knowledge accumulation. But as I’ve been saying more and more recently, I also want us to get much more systematic about compiling information on how to evolve journalism. And a growing chorus of voices seem to be converging on this point.

For example: after coming to Mizzou in December, David Westphal put out a call for information to create a database of independent news sites. (He started creating that database in October, profiling a number of independent news start-ups in a week-long series.) When it’s live, if it’s well taken-care-of, this database will become a spectacular resource.

I posted another example recently, Chris Amico’s stellar compendium of tools for news.

Can we also start compiling different approaches to funding, from micro-patronage to flyerboards to ad auction networks, along with some information about how different approaches are working?

Earlier, I mentioned that I was searching for great questions. We definitely need more of those, as Mark Hamilton argues in a post today. And these projects demonstrate how I’d like to see those questions answered — systematically, transparently, comprehensively and collaboratively. And this probably isn’t the last you’ll hear from me on this.

I’m working my way through a few hundred pages of reading on growth and development in Columbia, so forgive the quiet. Meanwhile, I haven’t done a consensus post in a while. But I happened upon this post from Zac Echola in my RSS reader today:

I’m going to be blunt, so pardon my French (again): Yes, I’m suggesting we may be completely fucking wrong with the entire system of news. Right now, when a story breaks, it breaks like a wave. Over a period of time, it rises in interest and discussion, peaks and then drops down until the next break comes.  We do this over and over again, forcing readers to surf these waves, be they big national stories or be they hyperlocal news breaks, it doesn’t matter. The format is the same: A never ending flow of new information. Nobody questions its validity as a methodology. But it is, in fact, a staple of old media systems.

I hope to type up a few thoughts later today that are popping up as I do my reading. For now, welcome Zac to the growing chorus of voices calling for much more attention to context.

Update: I published this with a different quote. On reflection, I liked the one above better.