Newsless.org

Howard Weaver writes a sweet, short paean to the dailiness of the newspaper:

I’ve been arguing for years that newspapers – yes, printed, daily newspapers – have a good long horizon on the value curve if they shift their focus to the value they already do best: summary, briefings, orientation, authentication. If a printed product did that well, the fact that it’s a once-a-day product would be a strength: a starting point, presumably first thing in the morning, which helped readers orient their day and prepare to parse and interpret all the fact-clotted data that would wash over them ceaselessly for the rest of the day.

I replied by asking why daily was the ideal cycle. “I might be part of a tiny minority in this regard,” I said, “but a weekly local news product would be even more valuable to me than a daily one, so valuable I’d probably even pay for it, if it was good enough.”

Howard’s response to me makes sense. Each of us, of course, has a routine that more-or-less repeats each day. It’s perfectly sensible that this routine should include a news component. And I wholeheartedly agree with him on this point:

I don’t think there’s any either/or here; let a thousand flowers bloom. A weekly compilation of quotidian news (tee hee) might be the best format for it. Other news, we all recognize, needs to be displayed as quickly as possible. A newsless, process-oriented news report should be timeless.

I agree that we should be working towards a news report online that serves the monthly visitor just as well as the hourly one. But cycles still drive how we produce the news. And many local journalists have to wedge their work into one of two cycles — either the rapid rotations that require updates every few minutes, especially favored by news sites in the morning and during the lunch hour, or the daily rotation driven by each day’s newspaper or broadcast.

I still wonder whether some news topics (and consumers) don’t demand different cycles entirely. In Columbia, for example, headlines on municipal matters often crescendo around the City Council meetings that take place on the first and third Mondays of the month. So news on this topic roughly corresponds to a biweekly cycle. And the biweekly publishing schedule of the Columbia Business Times, the local news publication that focuses on these municipal issues, suggests that this pace is well-matched to the topic. We often fret that these municipal stories don’t find much of an audience, but the Business Times is mailed to 6,300 local subscribers, which just about matches the daily circulation of the Columbia Missourian.

I suspect the Business Times audience might also have more of an appetite and expectation for deeper, more contextual stories than the general-interest Missourian audience. The cover story of the most recent issue of the Business Times was a massive series on transportation development districts that actually ran first in the Missourian. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that CBT readers ate that story up, while many Missourian readers skipped it.¹

Sure, topical newspaper sections in most places publish on a less-than-daily schedule. A typical newspaper might feature a Tuesday food section, a Wednesday business section, a Thursday arts-and-entertainment section, etc. These sections might even approximate the production cycle of a weekly more closely than a daily. But by bundling these sections into a daily product, mightn’t we be restricting their appeal to an audience who just wants that information, and doesn’t need it every day?

I gather niche publishing hasn’t been a silver bullet for those news orgs that have wandered into this territory. (Having spent three years as the online editor of a niche publication, I’m familiar with some of the problems.) But I have only the dimmest sense of what’s been tried in this regard. I’d love to see more experiments that paired the depth of a Columbia Tomorrow with the pace of a Columbia Business Times.

1. As you can tell from the “I suspect”s and “I wouldn’t be surprised”s in this paragraph, I don’t think we have much hard data either way, but boy, I’d sure love to see it. [↩]

OK, the mention wasn’t directly referencing my fellowship project, but Marissa Mayer reiterated her recommendation that news stories become much more like Wikipedia entries.¹ Here’s what she said:

The living story

The Web by definition changes and updates constantly throughout the day.  Because of its ability to operate in real-time, it offers an opportunity for news publishers to publish on changing and evolving stories as they happen. Web addresses (known as URLs — uniform resource locators such as http://www.google.com) were designed to refer to unique pieces of content, and those URLs were intended to persist over time. Today, in online news, publishers frequently publish several articles on the same topic, sometimes with identical or closely related content, each at their own URL. The result is parallel Web pages that compete against each other in terms of authority, and in terms of placement in links and search results.

Consider instead how the authoritativeness of news articles might grow if an evolving story were published under a permanent, single URL as a living, changing, updating entity. We see this practice today in Wikipedia’s entries and in the topic pages at NYTimes.com. The result is a single authoritative page with a consistent reference point that gains clout and a following of users over time.

You can read her full testimony at the PDF linked to here. Thanks to my co-blogger for pointing out the snippet.

The WSJ’s Digits blog brings up this criticism of the idea from unnamed publishers:

It will be interesting to see how newspapers react to this idea. Some publishers whom Google has spoken to about it worry that lumping together different stories would require a lot of development work without much pay-off, according to these people. It could also require changes to its reporting and editing process, they say, adding that most readers come to their sites to read a particular article about a certain piece of news, not to browse a topic.

First off, I have to point out that “most readers” don’t have the option of browsing topics on most news sites, so it’s hard to extrapolate about what they might do if given the option. (And I suspect it’s not much better to extrapolate from one case, if you’re looking at the example of Times Topics.) To the former criticism, I think I now have enough experience with a complex topic to make a strong argument that the workflow changes and effort required to start doing this are not all that huge.

1. Previously on Newsless. [↩]

Last week, I had a tremendous conversation with some of the smartest folks working in the news industry about, er, “the future of context.” Despite the lofty title, we managed to have a wonderfully focused discussion. I’m still processing the innumerable nuggets of goodness to figure out which ones to start with. Meanwhile, Martin Langeveld took notes, and they’re great.

Wow. My poor neglected blog has one post from the month of April. If you’ve been wondering where I was, wonder no more. I’ve been launching Columbia Tomorrow, a context-rich website on growth and development in Columbia, Mo.

I’ve recorded a 15-minute introduction to Columbia Tomorrow for those of you who’ve been following the argument I’ve been making on Newsless.

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