Does following the news work?
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.
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Hi Matt, during 30 years in daily newspapering, I was probably one of the more intense readers of local stories around, and yet, at times, I had the same sense as you that I had no idea what was going on. I think this is more true of local stories like you've been digesting than the kind of stories of national and global import that you read the Times for. The Times is good at continuously providing and updating historical context; while local reporters, who assume you're following the issue day by day, are not.
Martin Langeveld
13 Jan 09 at 2:12 am
Digesting eight years of stories from one town sounds incredibly masochistic. The problem, I think, is that you're expecting linear connections where there might not be any.
What if a different reporter covers a beat when the regular one is out sick? What if a topic goes 3 months without advancing, and then there's a brief update that assumes previous knowledge, or worse, that attempts to summarize a complicated issue in a single graf because the reporter only gets 4 inches to fit this bit into, and then that poor summary becomes the logic that the next reporter on the story hangs their derby on?
I think it only gets worse from there.
(Pretty sure that just *proves* the need for better topical archives and consistent taxonomy that makes it easier to string together information of any content type over time, plus the production of "stories" in content types other than the one called "inverted pyramid," right?)
ryansholin
13 Jan 09 at 3:39 am
"When the voters decide the issue, our work is done." Additionally, when the semester is over, often the journalist is done (in the case of the Missourian), and someone else comes in to pick up the ball. I vividly remember writing one of those pre-election development fee stories as a Missourian reporter (I was Kristin Markway then), and I would guess that my coverage is among the surface-level stories that are frustrating you right now!
Does following the news work? Yes and No. It's good for following the facts, as you discovered. You know who the major players are, you know the language of previous ordinances, etc… But following the news for the enterprise elements and high-level understanding you are looking for seems a little tricker to me. If previous reporters had that type of information, it would be good as context, but it could likely be completely useless as a practical matter. When I wrote my story in the boom-days of 2004 or 2005 (can't quite remember which semester), the economic impacts of a fee would obviously be different than if the fee were implemented in April 2009. The "value-added" elements have to continually change and update. Simply tracking the past won't take into account the panoply of current-day factors.
Another Devil's Advocate type thought: Doesn't this reporting take a lot of time (and thus money)? What sort of ROI can you expect when the reader's attention span is getting shorter?
I don't think this is a good or valid excuse, but I think a lot of times editors will shy away from the type of stories that require in-depth research and produce in-depth, multi-element stories that may only be of little interest to readers (I'm assuming the development fee still isn't garnering raucous public comment, but I could be wrong). It's much easier to report the facts as they stand now and try to get a "neutral" source to connect some of the dots for you rather than digging into all the different ways to gauge past effects of fees such as these (do you look at housing starts? housing prices? local business development that isn't happening because of decreased home building? Then how to reconcile all those factors with state and national economies to eliminate other things causing the effects, etc…). The path of least resistance may not be the right path, but unfortunately it seems to be the one most often traveled in these situations.
Kristin Shaw
13 Jan 09 at 4:01 am
Michael, that's a wonderfully succinct way of stating what I just replied to Kristin below.
I should have credited you.
mthomps00
13 Jan 09 at 5:56 am
I also think that national and international stories generally benefit from the massive fog of news outlets and commentators covering them. Between the Times and the Post and the Guardian and the Economist and the New Yorker and Newsweek and Talking Points Memo and James Fallows, much of the context of a national event is going to be dissected and analyzed. Local stories often only appear in one place, especially the nitty-gritty civic stories I'm talking about here. That's one big reason I endorse Ryan Sholin's open letter to the blogosphere so strongly.
mthomps00
13 Jan 09 at 6:01 am
Exactly right, Ryan. One of the more obscure concepts I hope to demonstrate in this little experiment here in Missouri is that producing our information in a more wiki-like format might help us overcome the continuity problems you describe. The Missourian is a great test bed for that. Reporters at the Missourian are students, so there's an unbelievable amount of turnover in the reporting corps, and very few opportunities to build up the kind of institutional knowledge that a longtime beat reporter will accumulate.
Among the many goals of my project is to turn that institutional knowledge — that intellectual capital — into real, tangible information for the public. Not only do I think that will help the public understand these issues much better, but I think it will help reporters and editors understand them better as well.
mthomps00
13 Jan 09 at 6:08 am
Exactly.
mthomps00
13 Jan 09 at 6:10 am
@mthomsp00 and kristen,
(I'll check out your links after this post.)
I think the issue might be one of time. If the local wiki is accumulated over time, with data points and standing questions from the editor, then information can be added over the course of weeks and even months, it should be able to be done without much strain. When it is time to publish, the questions have been asked, the background information has been stored. What is let is to add the facts that are brand new, and crystallize the story for your readers. Nothing goes to print before it's appropriate.
And, given the latest Print tech, if your wiki is set up correctly, there are numbers of people who are working on solutions that can go from HTML to XML. And from XML to Indesign pretty easily. That makes the production of the print version and the web version very similar.
So it might look like this:
your paper has a wiki with all the info about the fees. It might be organized as the players: the city government, the university, the developers. When there is some downtime, researchers & prosumers & disgruntled emmployees can add copy. Your job is to confirm facts and events. With a nbotification on a story that this has not be confirmed. Until it is.
You can use hyperlinks to connect things that might connect. Then there is a hearing scheduled in two weeks. You peg the story onto the coming event. And create the story for Print.
Do you think that would work?
Michael Josefowicz
13 Jan 09 at 7:50 am
Excellent comment, Kristin. And yes, you wrote a very helpful Q&A on a series of road-financing propositions back in October of '05. In that report, you included a wonderful contextual detail — "Lee's Summit Development Coordinator Ron Cox said developers there fiercely opposed the excise tax initially, but the city has seen no decline in development since it was enacted."
Part of the argument I'm trying to make is that this fee increase was in many ways a volley in a larger skirmish between developers and this group of residents (of course you remember the Smart Growth Coalition, and its nephew TARRIF). Reading the coverage, though, it feels as though this fee increase is the entire conflict. There's a larger, ongoing story there that's under-attended. This issue has a past and a future that's not reflected in the coverage, leaving me to have to draw those connections myself.
In the model I'm trying to execute, a couple years after Proposition 6 passed, we'd call up our Planning and Development Department (just the way you called up Lee's Summit's) and ask, "As best as you can tell, what effect have those fees had on development?" And we'd include the answer as a data point in that ongoing story.
I agree wholeheartedly that "simply tracking the past won't take into account the panoply of current-day factors." What I'm endorsing is covering the present as a waypoint towards the future. Keeping our eye on where present events are situated in a larger context. OK, the development fee increase passed. What does that mean?
I don't necessarily think this entails a greater commitment of resources. I think it requires a shift in focus, away from articles and towards stories.
mthomps00
13 Jan 09 at 5:55 am
Matt,
Do you think it's possible that the absence of a sense of history has something to do with the surface level of the reporting you describe. I would have thought your experiment would work. But perhaps it turns out the you can only write the "first draft of history" if you, the journalist, understands that it is history that you are writing.
Michael Josefowicz
13 Jan 09 at 12:35 pm
In my opinion, the real value creator of a local news organization is to increase social capital by educating it's readers . In America our challenge has always been a sense of history. It's one of the reasons we have such a hard time with "context."
If I remember correctly, one of the aims of your research is creating a wiki type repository for continuing stories. I would think that it could be maintained at first by the journalists, and perhaps later open to the public. Over time that could become the memory of the community. I wouldn't be surprised if you asked readers to fill in the blanks, a small but active group of readers would jump at the chance to share "how it was in the old days." Then it has to be vetted and confirmed by reporters as time permits.
The kernel to start might be the wikipedia entry on a community or area.
Seemingly disparate information could be entered when it happens, on slow news days, from home, from a blackberry, from reporters who don't follow that beat, from tidbits gathered from the internet, and by prosumer "reporters.". When events dictate that it's time for a story, the professional reporter with great writing skills has a much better chance of telling a story that works.
It seems to me it would also create a unique defensible value for any local newspaper. It's unlikely that crowd sourcing will maintain the focus nor be able to make the decisions about when the ever changing "history" becomes news. Nor will it do the necessary fact checking. That's still an editor's/beat reporter's job. If they do that job well, the brand will become more valuable in the eyes of the readers.
Whether it's output on the web or in Print is merely a business decision. If web revenues are sufficient to maintain a low overhead, it is much easier. But if the overhead is more significant, then intelligent, versioned Print products would be more appropriate. Print products could be special issue edition newspapers or sometimes paperback books specifically for schools or hospitals or veterans groups or what the locality dictates.
The good news is that it requires almost no investmentt to start. Step one would be for the editors to create the categories by asking the right questions. Then beat reporters would fill the wiki with what they know as they know it. An unintended benefit is that the progress of reporters can be easily tracked for performance evaluations.
The taxonomy would start with the editor's questions. It would be refined as information is added.
Michael Josefowicz
13 Jan 09 at 10:36 am
Is there a problem with methodology here? Can you really digest eight years worth of news coverage like that, as opposed to reading the stories over eight years and getting at least some of it by osmosis. Seems like you were drinking from a fire hose, and necessarily not getting all you could have gotten if you had ingested the information more gradually and been able to come to some conclusions and impressions more naturally than the circumstances of your experiment allowed.
Dale Singer
23 Jan 09 at 7:55 pm
I'd argue that I actually picked up a lot more reading these stories end-to-end than I would have otherwise. I was able to remember bits of earlier stories that the editors and reporters assembling this coverage had clearly forgotten all about. I'm convinced that if I'd been following these stories in real-time, I'd have even less of a clue what was really going on.
One thing that I might not have made clear is that I actually retained a lot doing it this way. I really do feel like it gave me a quasi-encyclopedic sense of obscure ordinances and minor City Council skirmishes. If I'd taken a drip-by-drip approach, it's not as though the blind alleys and dead ends I found would miraculously go away.
Plus, it's 366 pages, with a pretty manageable cast of characters. That's a sub-average novel. By this logic, the best way to read Pride and Prejudice would be the DailyLit approach. Which certainly has advantages, but I'm not sure better info retention is one of them.
mthomps00
23 Jan 09 at 11:29 pm
"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. "
Your repsonse to the devil's advocate Matt is where it all breaks down. 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.
I'm not being tautological (I'm not asserting a tautology?), 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.
Bill Dunphy
24 Jan 09 at 4:39 am
In addition to the bad journalism there is a problem with the medium. Pride and Prejudice, the novel is not equivalent to the movie or the TV series or the Cliff Notes. Yet it is all the "same" story.
It becomes a little more clear if the medium is placed in the communication ecology in which it exists.
"Breaking news" became the newspaper's value with the rise of the telegraph and then the telephone. It was driven by war reporting which created the necessary focus for a large audience. The importance of speed was also fueled by financial speculation where an information advantage is not only power, it is money.
Before that the newspaper was not primarily driven by advertising, but by subscription. With mass industrialization there came mass marketing and here we are. But in the era when debates, lectures and religious revivals were a significant form of "entertainment", newspapers would routinely serialize what later became novels.
Today, newspapers are not read, they are viewed and scanned. Too much other distraction and too many other media to scan -cable TV, Google news,Search. Readers for any particular story are a small percentage of the people who scan the media. The value added of the great writer/journalist is to craft the 1000 words or less that gets to the crux of it for those few who have the time and interest to focus on that story.
The purpose of a wiki is a resource for the writer/journalist. It uses the "crowd" to investigate, the wiki to organize and store, and the writer to write for publication.
I've been on a soapbox for a while that newspapers should sell stuff, instead of trying to sell information. Given the latest advances in Print technology, it is practical to offer that "366 page book" to "scanners" who want to become readers for that story.
My bet is that every important story about education, health, government and local economic development would find fans who would willingly pay for a physical book that puts it all in one place. The price would depend on the story. The sales would depend on offering it when the focus is high. With that model the Print newspaper would be optimized for scanning and selling local ads.
Headlines + a lede and two paragraphs + a link to the website + 1 or 2 "feature stories" + lots of pages of local ads. When the time is right, use the wiki to write the book and sell it through the website
Michael Josefowicz
24 Jan 09 at 10:39 am
As Chris Lasch so brilliantly pointed out, what's missing in professional journalism is argument, and this is what you've nailed in this post. A collection of facts provides little in the way of understanding, and it doesn't require a First Amendment. Argument is what we've removed from journalism, and we need to put it back.
Terry Heaton
24 Jan 09 at 2:13 pm
Exactly!
Michael Josefowicz
24 Jan 09 at 5:10 pm
Terry,
Thank you for the post.
I thought it might be useful to post what wikipedia says
"an argument is a set of one or more declarative sentences (or "propositions") known as the premises along with another declarative sentence (or "proposition") known as the conclusion. A deductive argument asserts that the truth of the conclusion is a logical consequence of the premises; an inductive argument asserts that the truth of the conclusion is supported by the premises."
So maybe it's not narrative, it's argument. Or some new form in between?
Michael Josefowicz
24 Jan 09 at 5:34 pm
Matt, you're absolutely right. I remembered wondering why people in focus groups were repetitively saying: "it is too complicated to understand the newspaper". I could not really figure it out. Was it the wording? Ten years ago, I was talking to my mom asking her why she had stopped her subscription to her local newspaper. She had just retired and had more time to read. She told me "I feel more stupid after reading the newspaper than before. I don't know who is Mr. X or company Y. I don't remember what happened six months ago to Ms W. So, because I don't want to feel like an idiot, I decided to stop to read the newspaper". It is when I understood what you're describing. We need context. We need perspective. We need time-lines. We need bios of people and companies, etc. Since, in every newspaper or magazine or site on which I am working, I am always pushing for contextual information. My problem? Journalists don't like to do it.
Jeff Mignon
26 Jan 09 at 9:17 pm
Maybe journalists "don't like to do it" because they don't have the tools to make a very hard job much easier. If the wiki grows, it should be fast and relatively easy for a well trained journalist to craft the story. But that means teaching journalists to write, to read, to be able to construct a good argument, to think historically and speak Science. A little less tech this and tech that. Not so much about twitter and video or blogging. A little more about classical liberal education.
Michael Josefowicz
26 Jan 09 at 10:13 pm
You're absolutely right about education. But I am not sure that it is such a hard job to provide context. Tools are around and easy to access and to use. It is more about switching from a journalist centric logic to an audience centric logic. In general, journalists don't think audience(s) and they think that news have an intrinsic value. If you think audience(s) it is not hard to figure out that they don't know everything and so, that it is necessary to repeat and contextualize. No?
Jeff Mignon
26 Jan 09 at 10:25 pm
In principle it's not hard. But to do it every day on deadline in sync with the news cycle is not trivial. Most everyone can be funny sometimes. But funny on someone else's time schedule is worth a lot of money. It's the difference between being a blogger and being a reporter.
The tricky part, even with the best education is to drill down below "audience" to the collection of tribes. It's the same problem I had when I was teaching designers. Turns out empathy takes a long time to develop. Each tribe speaks a different language. With newbies I found it works best to ask them to design for people "just like you." Only the great designers learned how to speak to different tribes in the tribes native language. I mean language to indicate the working assumptions of a world view. This does not mean a facile use of slang. It needs an implicit understanding that is usually earned by the most sensitive social scientists or comes naturally to those lucky enough to have the "gift."
Every once in a while you get a Bob Dylan. More often you get great studio musicians. Mostly you get people who can play an instrument. Mostly of all you get American Idol.
Michael Josefowicz
26 Jan 09 at 10:54 pm
[...] other day’s post on following the news started up a meaty little discussion. I considered posting this in that thread, but my thoughts [...]
On “bad journalism” at Newsless.org
26 Jan 09 at 6:50 pm
Thanks for the comment, Bill. My reply got so long I had to make it its own post.
Matt Thompson
27 Jan 09 at 12:02 am
You might enjoy reading Thomas Jefferson’s letter to John Norvell Washington, June 14, 1807. He shares similar thoughts.
Tim
27 Jan 09 at 5:27 am
On conceptual frames, I completely agree.
Poynter Institute’s Talking Points … Discuss
Tim
27 Jan 09 at 5:41 am
On “bad” journalism, An Anthology of Journalism’s Decline.
Tim
27 Jan 09 at 5:47 am
Matt –
As you know, I think you are defining, and working on, a critical issue as, paraphrasing Martin Langeveld, attention and trust become the new scarcities.
As Jane Stevens is working on web shells and other tools for community bloggers, your work on local wikis has to be integrated, or we will end up enhancing the potential for a "nauseating cacophony" that will end up driving people away, rather than engaging them in community issues.
The community bloggers have to be very active nurturers as they work within their web shells.
Thanks for working on this!
Chuck
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