Newsless.org

December 16, 2008:

I’m meeting with two grizzled editors at the Missourian who seem to eye me with a weariness borne of decades managing an endless semesterly churn of young reporters-in-training while trying to fill a daily news product. Because their newsroom is part of a university, I am among a similarly constant stream of folks who breeze through their offices promising to remake their business in the image of Google or Facebook or Twitter or Wikipedia or whatever the kids are on about these days. So I try to exude humility and earnestness as I ask them the most stupidly broad question they’ve ever heard: “What should I know about growth and development in this town?”

After a moment of complicated blinking and throat-clearing (code, I figured, for “Is this dude serious?” “‘Fraid so.”), they begin to speak. What ensues is brilliant — an hour-and-a-half stream-of-consciousness firehose of names, infrastructure financing mechanisms, development projects, ballot initiatives, and the like. Picture a cinematization of the game SimCity scripted by David Foster Wallace and David Mamet, and you’ll sort of get it. I take furious notes, and leave the office to begin assembling what will become more than 800 pages of dossiers on what I just heard.

January 23, 2009:

I’m back at the Missourian newsroom after some scintillating holiday reading about storm-water runoff and transportation development districts.  I’m giving the editors a sort of book report, outlining what I see as the major themes and unresolved questions in a body of literature they were instrumental in creating. We have a thrillingly enlightening conversation. And then one of the editors says something extraordinary. Matt, he says (in paraphrase), I’m just wondering when you’re going to figure out how much about all this we don’t know.

* * *

Journalism has long been described as a sort of cartography. But in news, local news especially, we almost never actually draw a map. Instead, we furnish a daily series of notable waypoints: at this intersection, you’ll find company layoffs; go down that road a stretch and you’ll bump into some public corruption.

Between those two moments at the Missourian, we sketched out the rough contours of a world composed of two equally important hemispheres – what we know, and what we do not know. Part of my goal is to help chart in ever-greater detail the former terrain – capturing the accumulated wisdom of our editors and reporters, our mayor and councilpersons, our developers, our activists, our supermarket clerks, our postal workers, our opera singers. And what I hope becomes the goal of my profession is to dispatch that body of explorers into the hemisphere of the unknown, toward the infinite task of claiming land from the wilderness.

I was revisiting Vannevar Bush’s 1945 essay “As We May Think” the other night, a text credited with having presaged the Web. Reading it, I realized that Bush had also foreseen Wikipedia: “Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.”

Best of all, Bush provides an excellent description of the role of tomorrow’s journalist: “There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.”

Find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. That’s a mission statement I can believe in.

As panic over the fate of journalism in America reaches a fever pitch, I’m dismayed how much of it continues in this ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ dichotomy that I thought had ended with the ‘who’s a journalist’ wars. I’m still reading criticisms of bloggers who don’t do any original reporting, or reporters whose work doesn’t match their professed standards of objectivity. In my darker moments, I’ll confess to thinking sinister thoughts about cable news personalities who engorge the public with an endless stream of trivia.

As we confront what we’ve lost in the decades-long contraction of the newspaper industry, and as we begin to figure out what we needed but never had, we have to reframe this conversation in purely first-person terms. It’s our society that has to evolve a journalism ecosystem to meet its information needs. It’s a bit of a forehead-slapper to write this, but we’re all in this together, folks.

I thought about this as I read Paul Starr’s excellent report on the decline of the traditional press and Yochai Benkler’s equally excellent rebuttal. Starr’s story is peppered with a panoply of thems; each section invokes the familiar faceless hordes that have long lent authority to news accounts — “some observers,” “many journalists,” “some critics.” That trope has been the downfall of many a news story, given that it’s often used to set up either a straw man or a he-said-she-said moment. The most effective elements of Benkler’s response draw on his tendency to recast those moments with an “I,” “we” or “our.” As in, “I think we do not have good research to know whether this system is also working for local politics and potential corruption as well. This, as Starr shows, is an important area we need to study and understand.” That “we” is universal; it’s any of us. It suggests any citizen might (must!) play a role in understanding this gap.

If a central element of the undoing of the traditional press is unbundling — the diminishing power of jointly packaging advertising and news, the atomization of formerly coherent monopoly news products into info-snippets on blogs and aggregators — a central element of journalism’s renewal will be connection — our ability and responsibility to all play shifting, complementary roles in a potentially vast system of journalism.

Today I’ve seen plenty of variants on a remark about Jon Stewart’s evisceration of Jim Cramer: “Why didn’t a journalist do that?” Answer: Because the role Stewart played is no longer reserved for journalists, if it ever was. Any of us can unleash a devastating act of media criticism, as Stewart did, or re-tweet such an act where and when we find it.

In all the coverage I read about growth and development in Columbia, Mo., the most significant investigative package didn’t come from the Missourian or the Tribune. It was a pair of studies done by citizen activist and university professor Ben Londeree, conducted with all the rigor of an academic. Londeree sought an answer to the question of how much it cost Columbia to hook new developments up to water and sewer connections, roads, and other infrastructure, as compared with the fees the city exacts from developers for their projects. Working with an activist group called the Smart Growth Coalition, he surveyed 40 Midwestern cities (.doc) to get an average of similar costs and fees elsewhere, to see how Columbia stacked up. Then, he compiled a dizzying array of variables specific to Columbia to estimate a figure for the city. And he was transparent about his methodology:

Community websites were studied to obtain as much information as possible about these financing issues. Some websites either didn’t have the information needed for the survey or I was unable to locate it. The most difficult to pin down is the category of exactions for off-site infrastructure because these typically are negotiated at the time of annexation, rezoning, or plan approval.

After the website search, the data were e-mailed to each community’s CEO (mayor or city manager) to verify for accuracy and completeness. A second request was e-mailed to non-responders about four weeks later. Since many still did not reply, telephone calls were made to planning departments and public works departments with excellent cooperation. In several cases, these calls helped to identify additional fees charged by a separate entity such as the county, metropolitan districts, benefit districts, co-ops, and private utilities.

As it happened, Londeree’s studies got quite a bit of local press. The next few years would see the Smart Growth Coalition expand its profile in Columbia city government. Advocates of the coalition’s ideas have now won four out of seven seats on the City Council.

Maybe once upon a time a group of reporters would have beaten Londeree to the punch, or replicated and extended his work to give it that journalistic seal of approval. We’re not in that world anymore. Our society’s welfare will increasingly depend on citizens taking on work that ambitious, as members of non-profits, for-profits, universities, knitting clubs, and every other type of organization out there. And it will depend equally on our ability to evaluate the work not by who did it — not whether it was “us” or “them” — but by how it was done.

Ezra Klein blogged yesterday about what he calls “one of the more frustrating tensions in political journalism,” riffing off this quote from the NYT’s Matt Bai:

Generally speaking, political writers don’t think so much of political scientists, either, mostly because anyone who has ever actually worked in or covered politics can tell you that, whatever else it may be, a science isn’t one of them. Politics is, after all, the business of humans attempting to triumph over their own disorder, insecurity, competitiveness, arrogance, and infidelity; make all the equations you want, but a lot of politics is simply tactile and visual, rather than empirical. My dinnertime conversation with three Iowans may not add up to a reliable portrait of the national consensus, but it’s often more illuminating than the dissertations of academics whose idea of seeing America is a trip to the local Bed, Bath & Beyond.

Klein makes a wonderful point:

Obviously, that doesn’t make much sense. Matt Bai’s conversations with those three Iowans would have gone fairly far towards explaining what those three Iowans thought was driving their vote. But though people don’t tell themselves that they’re tribal creatures who rationalize their attachments and make judgments based on the state of macroeconomic indicators, that explanation fits the data a lot better than anything Bai would have heard over dinner. Indeed, imagine those were Democratic Iowans. In 2004, they would have told Bai that they really believed it important to have a former war hero leading the nation in these times of peril and crisis. In 2008, that wouldn’t have been important to them at all, and instead, they’d have been more interested in a new direction and something called “change.” What people tell you about their vote often tells you a lot more about what they’ve been told about their vote than about why they’re voting the way they are.

But Bai’s piece does lay bare the journalistic tendency to prize “talking to people about stuff” over “learning about stuff.” If I call up Peter Orszag and ask him about the budget outlook, I’m “reporting.” So too if I attend a press conference and listen to other people ask Peter Orszag about the budget outlook. But if I spend a couple hours at my desk reading CBO and OMB documents, I’m not “reporting.” I’m researching. And to get an idea of how the guild distinguishes between the two, note that though a lot of journalists call themselves “reporters,” none call themselves “researchers.”

If this democracy business is going to work out in the long run, all the “us”es of world are going to have to stop sorting people into “them”s and snorting at them. That goes double for journalists.

As this all shakes out, I am confident we will emerge with a corps of individuals who claim journalism as their livelihood. Some small segment will be Sy Hersh-ian muckrakers, rock stars and outliers, stalking through shadowy worlds to singlehandedly expose untold corruptions. But many of them will be Josh Marshalls, for whom investigative journalism could not be done without a thousand engaged citizens each doing a tiny piece of it, and ten thousand more ponying up ten dollars in support of it.

Just as newspapers have lost their monopolies on their audiences, journalists have lost a monopoly on journalism. The responsibility for gathering information and evaluating it has spread throughout the citizenry. We have to figure out how to make that work. All of us. I’m confident we will.

Corrections are high on the long list of broken elements on news websites.

If a news article you read is later corrected, chances are very good that you will never know. Most news orgs, including the New York Times, still run a daily list of corrections as an article, tucked somewhere deep inside the bowels of the site. On the Times site, it’s not easy to see previous corrections; the Star Tribune offers an unhelpful dump of links as its corrections section. Many organizations have at least advanced to the point where the correction is posted to the original article, but many haven’t even gotten that far.¹

Handling corrections is one more thing blogs do better than articles. Because blogs are linear over time, bloggers can insert a correction into the flow of posts, alerting their communities to prior mistakes. And instead of the typically opaque correction news organizations give, bloggers have developed a wonderful standard practice — preserving the original text but striking through it, so readers know exactly what changed.

Wikis have the potential to do even better. The public revision history is an astonishing feat of transparency, allowing you to view at any moment exactly how a page has changed since you last saw it.² Whenever you revisit a story on a news site, you should be able to see exactly how it’s evolved over time. While at MSNBC, Rex Sorgatz once mused about the terrific notion of placing a slider at the top of every news story that would allow each visitor to see the story’s gradual transformation. This sort of idea becomes even more valuable when the stories are intended to live indefinitely, updated as developments emerge.

We could do much more with corrections, of course. At a minimum, corrections should be databased. This shouldn’t be any more difficult than adding a correction field to each story in our CMS, instead of just writing our corrections into the body of the story itself. It would allow readers to search for corrections by date, section or author, rather than having to check the corrections page every day to see what’s been corrected recently.

We should also be much more proactive about getting corrections to readers. If you read something on our news site that has changed or been corrected since you last saw it, we should alert you of the change during your next visit to our site.³

About four years ago, I daydreamed about an independent, crowd-sourced corrections site that would allow anyone to post a correction or clarification to information contained at any URI. In some ways, with the ubiquity of browser plug-ins and the like, that type of thing would be easier today. I constantly wonder about the accuracy or completeness of information I come across (often on major media sites just as much as indie blogs). I can think of a hundred logistical reasons why such a resource could never work, but folks practicing journalism could do a lot to make it unnecessary.

A robust corrections policy should be part of the ethic of every site that purports to do journalism. We should do our absolute best not to get facts wrong, but when we inevitably do, we should do our absolute best to make sure our visitors know it.

1. Take this doozy of a correction: In a Jim Souhan column on Page C1 Tuesday, the Ottawa player who retaliated for a Cal Clutterbuck hit was misidentified and the biting incident involving Jarkko Ruutu [Ed. note: !!] was mischaracterized. Ottawa’s Chris Neil did not play in the Saturday night game, and Ruutu was suspended for two games in January for biting the thumb of Buffalo’s Andrew Peters. Not only would you never know the original article was corrected, I’m having trouble figuring out from the two articles what exactly did and didn’t happen. [↩]
2. Like many things on Wikipedia, a diff page — which shows the difference between any two revisions of an article — seems prohibitively technical to laypeople. [↩]
3. I recognize that this would be a complete turnaround from the current, shamefaced way we treat corrections. I’ve worked with respected longtime reporters who have fought tooth-and-nail to keep minor, unquestionable corrections — such as misspellings — out of the paper. [↩]