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.

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