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. [↩]

Related posts:

1. Martin Langeveld’s notes on the future of context Last week, I had a tremendous conversation with some of...
2. The timing of local news cycles Howard Weaver writes a sweet, short paean to the dailiness...
3. The 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get I’ve come to the conclusion that there are four key...
4. Five concrete steps to improving the news Two notable things occurred in the wake of my post...
5. The case for context: my opening statement for SXSW Longtime readers of this site probably know that I’ll be...