Newsless.org

I’m often asked, “Do people really want context? Say you build out all these neat-o topic pages laying out the context behind the headlines. Do you really think anyone’s going to read that stuff?”

I say I don’t look at it as a matter of whether people want context, but when.

If you told me in July of 2007 that one of the hottest articles on StarTribune.com would be a detailed explanation of the workings of gusset plates and roller bearings in bridge engineering, I would have raised a very quizzical eyebrow. But when that bridge fell in August, gusset plates were the new Britney Spears.

Traffic to any given Wikipedia topic probably accrues over a long tail of time. Today, most folks probably have no interest in knowing about people who’ve had pies thrown at them. But chances are that over the years — probably in beer-friendly settings — a reasonable crowd of people will find themselves looking up that time Thomas Friedman dodged a pie at Brown University. Likewise, the Sarah Palin page that drew only a quiet, steady stream of interest for years suddenly lit up one day in August ‘08, for obvious reasons.

Road infrastructure financing isn’t a sexy topic. Headlines on bonds for road projects may languish unread while cute puppy photos get all the pageviews. But we’ll build and tend that road financing topic page anyway. And one day, when a bumpy ride or flattened tire has you wondering why your city has all these #$%@! potholes, we’ll be ready for you.

I’m not arguing that news organizations should create repositories of useless topics in the hope that one day some calamity will make those topics relevant. I’m saying journalists should ask themselves what’s most important for their communities to know, and cover it diligently. Not with the expectation that the coverage will draw an instant wave of traffic, but with the understanding that if it’s truly important, it will spark enough relevant news to draw a significant audience over time. And the more of that context we lay out, the more relevant we can be at any given moment. This is how we’ll begin to build relationships that matter with our communities.

By creating information assets, we make it likelier that our information will find our audiences when they want it. Consider the story of Jacqueline Dupree. One day, Jacqueline decided to start taking pictures of her a nearby neighborhood¹ to put on her website. She knew she wanted to document how the neighborhood was changing. Before long, the site had become a living history of an area in transition. Eventually, Jacqueline “reluctantly” found herself covering public meetings, publishing local data feeds, and generally creating a deeply comprehensive contextual record of the place.

Twenty months after Jacqueline began working on the site in earnest, the city announced it was building a stadium in the neighborhood. The site took off, and won a Batten Award for Innovation last year. Take a look, it’s not hard to see why.

Context as an engine for news

A focus on context also changes the definition of what we consider news. As my team creates these topic pages, we’re finding gaps in our understanding, stories that have fallen off our radar, and an infinite well of other fodder for further reporting. It turns out that when you attempt to assemble the most important information you have on a place, you begin to realize there’s no such thing as a slow news day. As I’ve said before:

Not two weeks ago, the Star Tribune’s reader representative was complaining about the midsummer absence of news. If we committed to providing regular updates on those important stories, we would be unearthing legitimate news that too often gets buried by the tyranny of recency. “Still No Action On Strengthening Levees,” the headlines might have said. “Bridges Languish in Need of Repair.” And if the warnings aren’t heeded, at least we will have traced the progress of a possible disaster before the fact, giving us unprecedented insight into what went wrong and when.

If truth is an asymptote, great journalism has no end.

The other day, Howard Weaver left a comment that seems appropriate to mention here:

For years I’ve warned newsrooms against the kind of thinking that led an educator to pronounce, “I was teaching, but they weren’t learning.” Impossible. And I think we need to embrace a similar responsibility: if 50% of the public still thinks Saddam was involved in 9-11, or that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, journalism has failed. Even if we did everything right, perfectly, by established standards, we have to be judged by the outcomes, not the inputs.

The upshot of my entire argument in this blog is that journalism’s highest purpose is delivering understanding. We don’t just cover the news for the sake of telling people what happened; we cover the news to help our communities understand themselves better, so they can improve. A story about a homicide might have some intrinsic value, but the greater value emerges when that story teaches its audience something about why homicide happens in a community and how the next one might be prevented. If we’re doing our jobs right, every such tragedy in a community becomes another hook to the larger story about how these tragedies might be stopped.

Using the news as a hook for context doesn’t mean running versions of the same story over and over again. It means reporting until we’ve exposed enough of the broader context of an issue for it to reach an audience. And when it finds that audience, it means giving them a means to discuss and debate and extend the story.

After New York Times reporter David Barstow unloaded a massive, months-long investigation into the Pentagon’s deployment of “military analysts” on television news shows last April, the news networks said nary a word. The story has since proceeded along a familiar path: Barstow wrote a follow-up story in November, trying to keep the issue in the spotlight. Another follow-up last month (the Defense Dept’s inspector general found no wrongdoing in the Pentagon propaganda program) was downgraded from the front page to A11. Any rage that boiled amongst the American people after the publication of the initial story has cooled to a simmer over time. And if someday the government is found to have launched another more insidious propaganda campaign, the New York Times will say, “We taught, but they didn’t learn.”²

I remember my own anger and disbelief when I read that original story in on NYTimes.com on the evening of April 19th, reciting aloud some of the sordid revelations to my boyfriend. I scanned the Sunday talk show transcripts the next day for mentions of the story, certain it was only a matter of time before it snowballed into a giant scandal. And when the networks were silent, I wanted more. Maybe a wiki that would trace the ongoing television appearances of all these well-compensated former generals and their connections to the defense industry. Or a Firefox plugin that could slip in a message on any page I viewed that mentioned one of the exposed “analysts” — talk about relevance.

A focus on delivering context means that the news is never the endpoint. The giant investigation doesn’t conclude with the Sunday A1 story, it erupts into something bigger. And the trail of a story doesn’t end with the passage of a bill or the resignation of an official. It doesn’t end at all. It merely connects with more and more dots that form an ever-clearer picture of a better society.

1. Correction: Jacqueline doesn’t live in the neighborhood, but just outside of it. [↩]
2. All this is not to say the story didn’t have an effect. Congress clearly got the message, and even after the inspector general’s report, the GAO and FCC are still investigating the Pentagon program. But I think the only thing that could really keep this from happening again is a sort of enduring public vigilance that never really had a chance to blossom. [↩]

With the news of the New York Times integrating its Web and print operations, and with similar integrations happening everywhere I look these days, newsrooms have been on my mind a lot recently. Coverage of the NYT move has been cautiously positive. Finally, people seem to be saying, the Web operation gets to wield proper influence on the print product. No more separate-but-equal.

But it all leaves me wondering – should unifying our newsrooms be the goal? Or should we be breaking them up?

Newsrooms are horribly, horribly seductive places.

My first stint in a newsroom came while I was a sophomore in college, at a local TV station. I was completely taken in. Visuals blaring out from TV screens and editing bays, computer terminals spitting off wire feeds, scripts and budgets and newspapers and magazines strewn everywhere, all against the crackle of the police scanner and the constant ringing of the news desk phone. I’d been jacked into the Matrix, standing right in the midst of this never-ending cascade of information. I felt more connected to the flow of news than I ever had before.

And I felt more disappointed with the final product.

In the newsroom, stories come alive, or so I thought. But as I rolled the TelePrompTer each evening and listened to the anchors’ scripted patter, I watched these stories devolve into abstract pastiches of disconnected fluff – flesh-and-blood people and their narratives turned into five-second sound bites, locator maps, random shots of houses, police tape in front of an overturned car, a reporter trying to look concerned, tag back to the anchors. I found the same thing happening in newspapers – a cutesy lead, restated with a quote, nut graf, strained moment of prose, awkward snap back to the institutional voice, here’s what fill-in-expert has to say, so-and-so refused to comment, here’s a good quote for a kicker.

Somewhere underneath it all, there was conflict and tension and catharsis and humor and life. But with only 35 seconds or 12 inches to fill, I figured, that usually had to be cut.

Over time, I realized that the newsroom really was the Matrix. The perfect facsimile of utter connectivity. All that information spitting, crackling and ringing around me? More often than not, that was just journalists keeping tabs on each other, trying to hear what everyone else was covering, looking for topics to localize. Where else in town could I have been less connected to the flow of news than in that imposing monolith with security guards at all the entrances? News, after all, rarely happens in a newsroom.

The Red Pill

Outside the newsroom, I began to indulge my inner info junkie with a new discovery: blogs. I found these unassuming little outposts weaving lifeless pieces of news into tapestries lush with characters and context. On the Web, people were forming connections and communities, with ethical codes subject to more passionate and thoughtful scrutiny and discussion than I’ve seen in many a newsroom.

If the chief virtue of the newsroom was connection, it was being beaten, hands-down.

Since my initiation into newsrooms, I worry less and less about connections between journalists at news organizations. The Washington Post maintains separate print and Web newsrooms and remains adept at coverage in both arenas. (And of course, the New York Times isn’t so shabby itself, integrated or not.)

Much more important but much less celebrated in my observation is the matter of our connections with our audiences. As journalists converge and consolidate with each other, who’s paying attention to our convergence with communities we cover? While I’d love more of our print and broadcast journalists to be infused with a hyperlinked mindset, I think our resistance to the Web in many cases is a symptom of our resistance to our audiences.

In the wake of coverage chasing “Rathergate,” I heard a lot about “attack blogs,” an idea lampooned most notoriously by the Daily Show’s Stephen Colbert:

Jon, the vast majority of bloggers out there are responsible correspondents doing fine work in niche reporting fields like Gilmore Girl fan fiction, or cute things their cats do or photoshopped images of the Gilmore Girls as cats. That’s great. Where I draw the line is with these “attack bloggers,” just someone with a computer who gathers, collates and publishes accurate information that is then read by the general public. They have no credibility. All they have is facts. Spare me…

Blogs are vicious, I heard journalists say. They swarm and destroy at will, with no sense of balance.

And what I kept thinking was, Folks, these aren’t “blogs.” They’re people. These harsh criticisms aren’t new, they’re just spilling into sight after years of being cooped up in living rooms, around dinner tables. We’ve drifted away from these people for decades as our newsrooms have swelled and overlapped, and now, thanks in part to blogs, we finally get to hear just what they’ve been saying. It isn’t pretty, and we shouldn’t be surprised.

If I could bend the world to my whims, I’d see our newsrooms exploded into a hundred little bits, as tiny, friendly and ubiquitous as coffee shops. People would flow in throughout the day and night to share news, comment on it, hear it. A hundred bureaus would strive to draw connections between their communities and the world around them. Letters to the editor would become conversations with editors and with fellow citizens.

For a hundred boringly practical reasons, of course, this is impossible. Where would we put the presses?! But even if our giant newsrooms stay intact, I want to start hearing more about the most important convergence – community convergence.

— Originally published on August 4, 2005 at morph.

My research proposal was called “Wikipedia-ing the News.” I’ve spent many posts chronicling the wonders of Wikipedia. Yet, as I’ve mentioned, the news site I’m creating to illustrate the arguments I’ve been advancing here will not be a wiki.¹ Why am I such a hypocrite?

I decided early on that given the time and resource constraints on my fellowship project, I would have to keep the site’s scope tight. As a result, there are tons of components of journalism’s evolution that this project will not significantly touch on — things like business models, social networking, and the world of mobile.

One of the things we heard loud and clear from the folks who led local wiki projects was that wikis are like gardens. They require a sustained investment of time and energy up front to make them truly valuable over the long term. Once the wiki is live, the community has to be nurtured, and goals and expectations must be set before the value of public editing starts to become plain. According to Mike Ivanov, one of creators of DavisWiki, he and the site’s other founding contributors spent months seeding the wiki with hundreds of articles on Davis before opening the site up to the public. I realized early that we probably wouldn’t have enough time to put in the investment to make the wiki worth it.

A lesser consideration in my decision to forgo the wiki was the feature set of available software. Playing around with open-source wiki packages such as MediaWiki and Expression Engine, I found that support for multimedia wasn’t the best out of the box. (The subject we’re covering — growth and development in Columbia, MO — will require a fair amount of multimedia to present effectively.) I also had some worries about how much flexibility the software would give us with the site design.

Finally, one of the things I most hope to demonstrate is that there’s nothing magical about a particular piece of software that enables the principles of journalism I’m arguing for. Focusing on delivering context doesn’t require a wiki, it requires a shift in purpose.

All that said, if this were an open-ended project, I absolutely would have made it a wiki. With enough time, we would have figured out design and multimedia. And if we succeeded in convening a community invested in the site, public contributions could be invaluable. I had a brief love affair with a little software package called Bitweaver, before deciding against using it in production. I’m tremendously intrigued about the possibilities for projects such as Semantic MediaWiki. Wiki software is only going to get more robust and interesting in the years to come. It’s awesome to see news organizations such as the Washington Post and Jacksonville.com experimenting with it. I’m sure one of my departing recommendations to the Missourian when I complete this fellowship will be to investigate transitioning the site to a wiki over the long term.

1. In case you’re wondering, I’ve decided to use Wordpress. [↩]