The 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get
I’ve come to the conclusion that there are four key parts to news stories, and we typically only get one of them, even though journalists possess all four, and the other three are arguably more important.
Note that when I say “news stories,” I mean an ongoing news topic, such as “health reform,” not a particular article. In fact, health reform’s been on my mind a lot recently, so perhaps it’s a good subject to help illustrate what I mean. I’ll start with the part of most news stories we get in spades:
WHAT WE GET: What just happened
Take a look at this Washington Post topic page on health reform. As I write, it includes a list of headlines signaling recent events in the health-care debate: several Democrats called the public plan essential, key senators are pushing cooperatives as an alternative, patients want more transparency on doctors’ links to Pharma, etc.
This stuff is what most news organizations consider the foundation of journalism: the news. To the extent that any of the other parts of a news story get traction, they must fit into a structure where the news is the main attraction.
Of course, this is also the most ephemeral piece of a news story. The reality that these headlines reflect today will likely be completely changed tomorrow. The lead article, about Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats calling the public plan essential, encapsulates an isolated moment of political posturing in a neverending storm of signals sent in press releases, conferences, and interviews, through spokespeople and Twitter accounts, during appearances on Sunday talk shows. By October, this story will lose most of its present meaning.
We often theorize that over time, the accumulated weight of all this news compresses into a sort of understanding, but I remain unconvinced. At any rate, this might be the worst foundation on which to rest journalism, especially considering that it’s merely a component of the next, more important part:
WHAT WE MISS (1): The longstanding facts
At the scale of news, almost every story looks complicated. Health reform is an impossible-to-follow morass of Congressional committees, policy proposals, industry talking points, and think tank reports. Pull back the lens a bit, however, and you see a fairly straightforward story whose basic contours haven’t changed all that much since 1994.
There is a universe of facts that stay essentially fixed from day to day. Tomorrow, we can be virtually certain that the three basic problems health reform seeks to solve will remain the same as they were last year: effectiveness, cost, and access to care. The same individuals will be heading the same committees they were in the spring. Lobbying groups on different sides of the equation have staked out slightly different positions than they did 15 years ago, but these shifts have been telegraphed over years, and everyone was well-nestled into their respective corners by June. Understanding the forces that combined to defeat health-care reform in 1945 and 1994 will give you a solid vantage point from which to understand the battle in 2009.
The story is much more manageable at this level. Everything that’s changing day-to-day — the news — is the hardest-to-understand component of this picture.
And this is key: To follow the news, you have to grasp this piece. Without this, headlines about “the public option” and “employer pay-or-play” and “MedPAC” are just noise. Having this basic understanding creates the desire for news.
In reality, these longstanding facts provide the true foundation of journalism. But in practice, they play second-fiddle to the news, condensed beyond all meaning into a paragraph halfway down in a news story, tucked away in a remote corner of our news sites. Take a look at that WaPo page again. Currently, a link sits on the far right side of the page, a third of the way down, labeled “What you need to know.” Click on that link, and you’re taken here: a linkless, five-paragraph blog post from May. This basically captures our approach to providing the necessary background to follow the news.
WHAT WE MISS (2): How journalists know what they know
This is a component of every news story that journalists tend not to provide for two reasons: 1) explaining how we get information disrupts our institutional authority and 2) we think it makes stories less interesting.
I think both assumptions are wrongheaded. Understanding how a news story came together is often a vital part of both understanding and enjoying that story.
Once again, let’s use a health reform article as a proxy for this point. On August 5, the New York Times dropped a bomb shell on followers of the health reform debate. The paper reported that the White House had cut a behind-the-scenes deal with PhRMA to prevent Congress from bargaining down drug prices in exchange for $80 billion in savings from the industry. The article that contained these revelations is a whirlwind of posturing — it’s filled with various parties backing away from things or “privately acknowledging” them or floating trial balloons. We know almost nothing about how the reporters got this story. The article feels like a pure flurry of spin. Weeks later, other reporters are still trying to trace back the story of who said what when, and why — the “real story,” in other words, hidden between the lines that appeared in the Times that day.
What undermined the Times’ institutional authority in this case isn’t the revelation of a reporter’s perspective or methods. It’s the perception that the Times is being used as a tool by various interests. The Times’ lack of transparency about its process helps further this perception.
As for the narrative argument, the undisputed most effective piece of journalism on health reform this year was a piece in the New Yorker by Dr. Atul Gawande. Washington Post columnist and health reform wonk Ezra Klein called it “the best article you’ll see this year on American health care.” Kaiser Health News ran an article about its impact, asking a panel of health experts to comment on why it was so powerful. Almost as soon as Gawande’s piece was published, references to it began appearing in President Obama’s speeches. Trust me, it was big.
Read that story, and you might be surprised by how much Gawande focuses on his reporting process. At every turn, Gawande walks you through exactly what he sees, who he’s talked to, and how he comes to his conclusions. In one vignette, he gathers six doctors for dinner, and reproduces highlights of their conversation on the costs of medical care. It’s extraordinarily effective, both as a narrative and as a piece of journalism.
What Gawande did was to structure his search for truth as a quest narrative. Instead of hiding the details about how he comes by his information, he makes that the very focus. Along the way, he makes us apprentices in his quest for truth. We finish the article with a highly refined sense of how Gawande has acquired and verified the information he presents, as well as a framework for further inquiry of our own.
We get a lot more out of this type of reporting, in other words, than the vast majority of news stories, which leave these details out.
WHAT WE MISS (3): The things we don’t know
We often think of journalism as encompassing what we know. But a key part of journalism that usually goes unreported is what we don’t know.
This much is uncontroversial: Every news story is a blend of facts and uncertainties. This should be as uncontroversial, but isn’t: It’s just as important for journalists to enumerate the latter as the former.
This excellent article by Politifact’s Angie Holan takes the rare step of explaining “What we still don’t know.” Beneath that header, Holan lists a few key questions that no journalist covering health reform can answer: Will it have a public option or a variant of it? If so, what will that include? Will it hold down costs over the long term? How will Congress pay for it? Follow the debate over time, and you’ll find that these are the questions that drive our reporting on health reform. Pursuing the answers to these questions is how journalists find the news.
But rarely do we acknowledge what we’re pursuing. When our questions make it into the coverage at all, they have to appear in the mouths of our sources, resulting in paltry, contorted pieces like this one, from the AP. Or they’re attributed to no one, weaseled into a headline that says only, “[Such-and-such] raises questions.” Whose questions? Not ours, certainly.
When Angie Holan lists the uncertainties around health reform, she’s providing a sort of cliffhanger: Will the Congressional health reform bill include a public option? Stay tuned to find out! Not only does it give us a framework for anticipating (and thereby managing) the information that will come in next, it also stokes our interest in that information.
Changing the model
As long as the news is structured solely around what just happened, journalists are going to be fighting a rough battle. With a latest-news-only approach, we stoke demand for journalism by trying to snag people’s attention with each new development.
There’s another way, one that leads to a more informed and more loyal public, and allows us to do better work. It involves:
- Enlarging the market for journalism by making it easier for more people to understand the longstanding facts behind each story.
- Increasing the appeal of journalism by letting folks in on the details of our quest to uncover the truth.
- Expanding the appetite for journalism by explaining what we don’t know, and what we’re working to find out.
As news consumers, we should be demanding these things as well. After all, right now we’re only getting the lamest part of the story.
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I hope you’ll be discussing Wikipedia in your panel. It’s done a pretty good job of providing a platform for at least part of the missing context you are looking for.
(Megan Garber’s recent piece is relevant here: http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/health_care_and_wikipedia.php )
Sage Ross
20 Aug 09 at 10:13 am
Heh. Take a gander at my research proposal, Sage. The title? “Wikipedia-ing the News.”
The original title of the SXSW panel, in fact, was “The Future of Context: Wikipedia’s Portents for Media.”
Matt
20 Aug 09 at 10:17 am
This a great article, and it got me wondering about a user interface for this kind of journalism.
Have you updated your ideas since putting together the Crosscreek Center sample page?
Kyle
20 Aug 09 at 10:21 am
[...] Thompson, of Newsless.org, published an interesting essay about the three parts of a news story you usually don’t get. You usually don’t get them [...]
Fleshing Out Meta-Reporting | Rhetorica
20 Aug 09 at 10:35 am
Kyle, I tested out some of these ideas in a newsroom setting with Columbia Tomorrow, although I think there’s a lot of room for improvement in the interface/storytelling department. My quick-hit projects on health reform and the financial crisis were attempts to get at some of these ideas from another direction as well.
Matt
20 Aug 09 at 11:46 am
[...] Thompson uses US healthcare reform as a launchpad for analyzing the best and worst of journalism. This is a must read. (via waxy) [...]
The 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get : clusterflock
20 Aug 09 at 12:55 pm
The main reason I subscribe to the New Yorker is the amazing reporting that they have, and I agree completely about the article mentioned above. Reading it gave me more insight that all the other news sources I follow up to that point. When I read that, I think it’s no wonder newspapers are folding, b/c there cannot hold a candle to the depth of information the NY provides. Single best provider of journalism today as far as I’m concerned.
Scott Plumlee
20 Aug 09 at 2:34 pm
You’re basically advocating that news articles be structured more like science research articles.
e.g.,
“what just happened” is similar to the “results” section of a primary research article.
“the longstanding facts” is roughly equivalent to the “introduction” of most research articles.
“how journalists know what they know” is analogous to “references” and sometimes “materials and methods”
“what we don’t know” would typically be part of the “discussion” section of a research article, which typically places new results in the context of what was known and what remains to be understood.
As someone above pointed out, Wikipedia (often) does something closer to this ideal, but I think it would be great for news outlets to follow this approach. Of course, it would be more difficult to do this and this is probably at least part of the reason it *isn’t* done.
The other reason (I think) is that many reporters lack the sufficient grasp of their subject matter that would allow them to write “the longstanding facts” and “what we don’t know”
pablo diablo
20 Aug 09 at 2:49 pm
[...] I just found this article on what we are missing in news reports. [...]
Random Musings and Nicknacks » Blog Archive » What the news is missing
20 Aug 09 at 3:00 pm
Isn’t it exactly the point of 24 hour news channels to ONLY bring the ‘what-just-happened’ part of the news? The very fact that todays certainties will have changed tomorrow is good for them – it gives them something new to report on tomrrow. The fact that we never really reach a level of understanding is good for them too – they can intersperse their 24 hour headline coverage with ‘in depth specials’ that really are no such thing, but are just an amalgamation of several day’s worth of shallow headlines.
It would be nice to think that news consumers would demand the kind of approach you’re suggesting, and that there would be journalists willing and able to provide it, but I can’t see it happening and that is very sad.
GadgetGav
20 Aug 09 at 3:31 pm
Great post. I agree with Sage — and apparently AP’s recently leaked internet strategy suggests that they see Wikipedia the same way. Wikipedia’s editability and licensing model is pretty unique in the media space (everyone is free to edit, and if you reuse the text elsewhere, it stays free to copy from there too).
Eoin Dubsky
20 Aug 09 at 3:42 pm
Thanks for the great article. It is my hope that news organizations will use their web sites for presenting this type of information. Today, more than ever it is context, background and insight that the public wants, not news snippets.
Jay Kinghorn
20 Aug 09 at 3:44 pm
[...] The 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get As long as the news is structured solely around what just happened, journalists are going to be [...]
saliano.net » What are we missing?
20 Aug 09 at 4:10 pm
Good post, as always. I think the absence of longstanding facts is probably the most important of the missing pieces you identify.
Any ongoing story — whether global issues like health care, Afghanistan, the financial crisis, or local issues — that doesn’t provide this context is a turnoff for readers. Each story without context makes them think, “Wait, I don’t get it.” Constantly encountering stuff you don’t understand — but that the editors/writers who give you this stuff clearly expect you to understand — can leave you feeling stupid (or at least frustrated).
I can think of a few reasons why newspapers traditionally haven’t provided this kind of coverage. One is institutional culture; as you said, the incremental recent stuff “is what most news organizations consider the foundation of journalism.” Another is that newspapers tend to prize “getting a quote” and “shoe leather” while treating research and reading — the kind of knowledge-acquisition required for good longstanding-facts journalism — as not quite real reporting.
A related reason is newspapers’ objectivity fetish: Whereas magazine conventions allow Jonathan Cohn to be the (or an) authoritative voice on health care in his articles, a newspaper reporter would have to get some outside source or expert to say the same things. (Of course Cohn cites experts and sources as well, but he’s much more free to also be one himself.) If you can’t use your expertise directly in a story without channeling it through someone else, there’s less incentive to develop that expertise.
So while reading New Yorker/Atlantic/New Republic articles feels like you’re reading either true experts or people who are fully versed in the experts’ work, you get that feeling much less often when reading newspaper articles.
Whatever the reason, this makes no sense anymore — at least online. I’m guessing you and Angie Holan (who I worked with at the St. Pete Times) aren’t as immersed in the health care story as Cohn or Ezra Klein. But you were still able to create something as valuable as deathpanels.org, and Angie wrote that great primer you cited.
*Any* news organization should be able to create similar context-rich roundups and backgrounders online. All it takes is some time to find the best coverage and context, and a willingness to link.
Josh Korr
20 Aug 09 at 4:19 pm
It’s interesting, with the exclusive focus on “what just happened” (especially with “breaking” TV news shows), that the race to be “best” is replaced by the race to be “first.” And, on some of the more dubious new shows, “what just happened” crosses over into the realm of speculation or wishful thinking, e.g., “this is what we think is going to happen,” or even: “this is what people are going to do.”
In the latter case, the news is more like self-fulfilling prophecy: the story prompts people to do something that becomes the next story, etc. (For example: “it looks like people are going to gather to mourn Michael Jackson…” becomes “people are gathering…” becomes “the big story is all the people gathered together…,” etc.)
So, obviously, some people accept that speculation as fact-based news–but, in any case, I think they see it as a useful story because it tells them some or all of what they think they’re going to need to know, *tomorrow*.
With the other 3 parts of the story, I think the news any night might reveal that: 1) the facts may not have changed, 2) a common understanding and/or shared opinion may not be held, and 3) what you need to figure out may be as big or bigger than it was yesterday.
Jay Fienberg
20 Aug 09 at 4:26 pm
As a strong supporter of Second Amendment rights, and having a firm firsthand understanding of how firearms operate and the landscape of makes and models, it’s very easy for me to spot the nearly universal errors and distortions in every news story containing more detail than “guns were involved”. If the news is so horribly bad at reporting a subject I know intimately, what equally egregious errors and distortions are slipping by me because they deal with subjects with which I am not so well acquainted?
DB
20 Aug 09 at 6:23 pm
[...] Três partes essenciais das notícias que faltam nos jornais Já há muito tempo (e por variadas razões) que sei que de uma notícia, mesmo simples — digamos, a queda de um avião –, a única coisa que fico a saber com certeza é que caiu um avião. O resto é um arrazoado de tretas, por vezes infindáveis. Newsless. [...]
Quinta do Sargaçal – Parkinson: O elo dos pesticidas +
20 Aug 09 at 7:36 pm
Interesting article, but I can’t help but think it completely ignored distinctions of genre – “News” and even “journalism” does not exist. Magazine journalism does. And newspaper journalism does. And radio. And TV broadcast. Basically, you argue that newspaper journalism should be magazine journalism.
But if I’ve read Atul Gawande, I don’t really need all the context each morning as I sip my coffee. Nor do the newspapers, which can hardly afford to print an extra inch. The question of how much context to include (and I think we can safely include, all three “unreported” elements identified here as “context”) is not, and should not, always occur in a vacuum. Instead, it should carefully take account of the audience and resources at hand. In this case, several elements will be cut, and justifiably so.
Brian C
20 Aug 09 at 8:19 pm
I think the economist does great with long standing facts, especially on complicated foreign stories where not understanding the context would leave the read completely lost.
Matt H
20 Aug 09 at 8:40 pm
There is a magazine that I believe does follow some of the guidelines. This is a magazine that behaves like a newspaper, The Economist.
Although I’ve heard many charges levelled agaisnt it, I have never ceased to be surprised by their ability to make a story clear (in fact, repetitivly so, their first paragraphs often repeat themselves and I skip them to get to the new developments), follow unseen or unheard of stories with interest (perhaps because, economically speaking, the whole world is interesting) and allow for a clear editorial voice, that is not hidden and is in fact, transparent in some manner. They include have links to sources that can develop the story further (something I find deplorable other newssites simply refuse to do) and they’ve never been known to follow the newscycle very closely.
For those reasons, and for the fact that they only seem to update with important things, and almost no topical subjects (leaving me with more things to do than just check on the news all the time) makes me an avid reader. I don’t subscribe because I find their a few occasional buys and their website sufficient, and if they turned it pay-only tomorrow, I would consider it (even though their current model, of keeping their older articles for paying members only, is interesting).
Rafael Lino
20 Aug 09 at 10:04 pm
[...] The 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get at Newsless.org [...]
Fortune Unmasked » The 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get.
21 Aug 09 at 12:04 am
Actually the traditional British model of news reporting does have an emphasis on context.
American style journalism: “Yesterday Senator Joe McCarthy (R. Wisconsin) addressed the senate holding a manila envelope proclaiming, “In my hand is evidence showing there are at least 57 communists working in the US State Department!”
British style journalism: Same as above, except adding “Two days before hence he made a similar claim saying that there were 132 communists, the day before, the number was a mere 24…” etc.
Quite a difference.
Colonel Nikolai
21 Aug 09 at 12:28 am
[...] The 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get at Newsless.org (tags: article editorial news meta) [...]
links for 2009-08-20 | The 'K' is not silent
21 Aug 09 at 1:01 am
[...] Thompson, of Newsless.org, published an interesting essay about the three parts of a news story you usually don’t get. You usually don’t get them [...]
Fleshing Out Meta-Reporting | MEME ORANDUM
21 Aug 09 at 2:01 am
After reading it, I realized that these foundations shouldn’t just be for news articles but any form of information publication – be it information graphics, documentaries, or non-fiction books. A great article.
Norris Hung
21 Aug 09 at 3:04 am
[...] The 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get at Newsless.org (tags: journalism) [...]
CasdraBlog » Blog Archive » links for 2009-08-21
21 Aug 09 at 6:02 am
[...] pretty sick of the daily news on the topic. Why? Here’s an excerpt from an excellent post on what’s missing from the news and why this means that so-called up-to-the-minute news can hide the real story as often as it can [...]
Stopped Caring About Health Care Reform? Maybe There’s a Cure… « Off the Charts
21 Aug 09 at 7:06 am
[...] http://www.newsless.org/2009/08/the-3-key-parts-of-news-stories-you-usually-dont-get/ [...]
Greg K Nicholson (gregknicholson) 's status on Friday, 21-Aug-09 12:08:09 UTC - Identi.ca
21 Aug 09 at 7:08 am
[...] The 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get at Newsless.org As long as the news is structured solely around what just happened, journalists are going to be fighting a rough battle. With a latest-news-only approach, we stoke demand for journalism by trying to snag people’s attention with each new development. There’s another way, one that leads to a more informed and more loyal public, and allows us to do better work. It involves: * Enlarging the market for journalism by making it easier for more people to understand the longstanding facts behind each story. * Increasing the appeal of journalism by letting folks in on the details of our quest to uncover the truth. * Expanding the appetite for journalism by explaining what we don’t know, and what we’re working to find out. As news consumers, we should be demanding these things as well. After all, right now we’re only getting the lamest part of the story. (tags: journalism news media transparency newspaper reporting) [...]
links for 2009-08-21 « Unjustly
21 Aug 09 at 8:31 am
Matt,
Great piece. Newless.org has just made it into my invaluable RSS reader.
I think what’s interesting is that you’re focus isn’t so much on journalism itself, but the practice of journalism to increase the knowledge base of the public.
I agree that we absolutely need more context in news. Nudging the news cycle to a little bit wider perspective than 24 hours wouldn’t hurt either. While 24 hours may be profitable, I’ve spoken with far too many people who are up to speed on the issues of any given day, but lacking in putting together the big picture of any topic.
David Wynn
21 Aug 09 at 9:00 am
Economist: yes. Note that it is a weekly and covers the entire world. Can a local paper do a daily that is of the same format? Unlikely, unless it is very very thin.
Structure news like Research Papers: I was thinking the same thing. But note that professional academics rarely read entire articles, but instead do (something like) “Abstract” -> maybe “References” -> maybe “Introduction” -> maybe “Conclusion” -> maybe “Experiments” -> maybe read whole paper. Something like an Economist article could be viewed as attempting to thin the paper out to remove redundancy, with the data (if available) usually put in a side graphic for optional perusal.
ben
21 Aug 09 at 9:07 am
[...] The 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get http://www.newsless.org/2009/08/the-3-key-parts-of-news-stories-you-usually-dont-get/ [...]
Susan Pinochet (spinochet) 's status on Friday, 21-Aug-09 14:39:25 UTC - Identi.ca
21 Aug 09 at 9:39 am
[...] Gleaned: Three Parts of News Not Delivered 20 Aug 2009 “As news consumers, we should be demanding these things as well. After all, right now we’re only getting the lamest part of the story.” Source: The 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get at Newsless.org [...]
» Gleaned: Three Parts of News Not Delivered Living Juicy
21 Aug 09 at 10:45 am
Gawande’s New Yorker piece is justifiably influential. However, before anyone bestows “best article you’ll see this year on American health care” honors, read this:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200909/health-care
Warning: It’s long.
Larry
21 Aug 09 at 11:34 am
[...] three missing pieces. I’ve come to the conclusion that there are four key parts to news stories, and we typically only get one of them, even though journalists possess all four, and the other three are arguably more [...]
The three missing pieces. « w0rd.
21 Aug 09 at 1:25 pm
[...] The 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get http://www.newsless.org/2009/08/the-3-key-parts-of-news-stories-you-usually-dont-get/ [...]
Christine Prefontaine (prefontaine) 's status on Friday, 21-Aug-09 18:47:57 UTC - Identi.ca
21 Aug 09 at 1:48 pm
[...] The 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get, by Matt [...]
EMDC » Discussion of Twin Cities News(papers) Hosted by KFAI
21 Aug 09 at 2:27 pm
Reminds me of the quote, “weak minds talk about people, average minds talk about events, great minds talk about ideas” Modern journalism gets stuck on the first two, and is boring.
Franky
21 Aug 09 at 4:07 pm
[...] The 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get. [Newsless.org] [...]
Web and Technology Links: 21 August 2009
21 Aug 09 at 8:10 pm
[...] The 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get at Newsless.org (tags: writing journalism) [...]
links for 2009-08-21 « Blarney Fellow
21 Aug 09 at 8:12 pm
[...] The 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get at Newsless.org – [...]
Items of interest » Blog Archive » Bookmarks for August 21st from 09:20 to 09:20
22 Aug 09 at 4:32 am
what’s you take on mahalo and their “quick facts” around news? do you think the model can it be expanded to provide the long lasting facts?
jon
22 Aug 09 at 12:24 pm
[...] The 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get [...]
Saturday Linkfest | The Big Picture
22 Aug 09 at 3:31 pm
[...] The 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get [...]
Saturday Linkfest | HighYields.com
22 Aug 09 at 3:40 pm
Yes! Thank you for expressing well my decades-long frustration with most news articles: insufficient or no context (aka “long standing facts”).
Mike M
23 Aug 09 at 2:37 am
Oh yes… Good journalism and good journalists.. Not so easy to find nowadays. It is this kind of superficial news that makes me not check the news. It seems like anybody who knows how to type on a keyboard is considered and hired as a journalist. The same goes to most blogs. Never giving sources or references, not backing up statements, not explaining the “background” details…
The sad thing is that many people are not familiar with real journalism and they don’t miss it. Therefore they don’t ask for it and keep consuming garbage news. Hence we have an utterly ignorant society that votes or take a stand in issues they have no understanding of whatsoever.
Jfk
23 Aug 09 at 3:38 am
[...] Thompson, writing on his weblog, Newsless – Time to stop breaking the news, and start fixing it: I’ve come to the [...]
The three parts of news stories you usually don’t get « Last Straw
23 Aug 09 at 4:59 am
The thrust of your comments is, I think, that news articles need more (currently missing) context. You mention associating “longstanding facts” with news stories as one such omission.
Were that as simple to do as you imply, it would already be standard practice. But to consistently do that, you need to store the collection of “longstanding facts” somewhere and – this is critical – develop some way to link them to relevant stories. This is because, while a particular news event may be narrowly focused, the link to “longstanding facts” must recognize that this particular article is part of a theme that also includes the facts.
If you have a small number of such themes, it’s pretty manageable. But when the number (inevitably) rises, what was simple and obvious becomes anything but.
You might be tempted to finesse the issue by making the implied themes broad. Yes, that would make the mapping easier; but the meaning would tend to suffer. Broad, general facts don’t add much meaning to specific stories.
But I think context goes way beyond “longstanding facts.” Readers also want to know “what it means?” How significant is it? What are the main trends? What’s at stake? Who are the players? What are the players’ agendas? Who is winning, losing? What changes are coming?
Finally, on your point of having journalists provide more information on how they developed the sources and story: I think some readers would be interested in more of that. But, in the examples you cited, it seemed to me that the reporter went too far in focusing on the process rather than the outcome.
Terry Steichen
23 Aug 09 at 1:56 pm
If they tell us the things we don’t know, then there won’t be anything we don’t know and there wouldn’t be a reason for anyone to write anything. Now I don’t know if I’m making sense!?
Debbie Norris
23 Aug 09 at 8:32 pm
[...] Here’s one for debate: an opinion piece at newsless.org on what’s “missing” from the news. A bit US-centric, but could be relevant: The 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get at Newsless.org [...]
August round-up of media stories « We Study Media
24 Aug 09 at 2:54 am
[...] The 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get at Newsless.org (tags: onlinejournalism workflow) [...]
links for 2009-08-24 « Glenna DeRoy
24 Aug 09 at 10:59 pm
In your ‘What we Miss’ point 2 about how journalists know what they know, I think you’re missing the point that source protection is oft of concern.
Matt Kelley
26 Aug 09 at 12:53 am
Yes, recognizing this is a great beginning. Tracking “context” is a central skill for competent journalism, no doubt about it. The details of what constitutes “context” for the question at hand … that’s perhaps an art that distinguishes the quality of the journalist’s work.
This is a very good article, but to me the amazing thing about it is not that it says anything revolutionary but that it isn’t more bloody obvious to more people.
Todd I. Stark
26 Aug 09 at 10:25 am
[...] http://www.newsless.org/2009/08/the-3-key-parts-of-news-stories-you-usually-dont-get/ [...]
4 seiten einer nachricht | nerd it yourself
26 Aug 09 at 2:23 pm
[...] 9:55 pm on August 26, 2009 Permalink | Reply Tags: media (52) The 3 key parts of news stories we don’t get. The longstanding facts. How we know what we know. What we don’t know. § [...]
The 3 key parts of news stories we don’… « Paul M. Watson
26 Aug 09 at 4:55 pm
[...] The 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get [...]
Linkfest Thursdays: August 27, 2009 | jappler.com
27 Aug 09 at 8:18 am
Matt –
Great, though-provoking post. I frequently find that I don’t have the perspective I wish I had on the news. Trouble with me is, I often won’t go out of my way to get it. I’m more likely to do so now that we have Google and Wikipedia to help. But, to be honest, I am often distracted or lazy.
If the majority of the news audience is similarly distracted or lazy and attracted by headlines and not substance, then I would say the news media is giving us what we show we want rather than what we say we want, or what is good for us.
To change the news media, we need to change ourselves. Maybe context will become the next “green” or “local”. Maybe.
Jeannienu
28 Aug 09 at 11:39 am
The 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get |Newsless.org …
I’ve come to the conclusion that there are four key parts to news stories, and we typically only get one of them, even though journalists possess all four, and the other three are arguably more important.(via @trianta)…
buzz
29 Aug 09 at 2:49 am
[...] The 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get [...]
DesignNotes by Michael Surtees » Blog Archive » Link Drop (8·28·09)
29 Aug 09 at 11:55 am
[...] Two notable things occurred in the wake of my post the other day about the key parts of news stories you don’t usually get: [...]
Five concrete steps to improving the news at Newsless.org
1 Sep 09 at 11:11 am
[...] post is inspired by this one at Newsless: The 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get I’ve come to the conclusion that there are four key parts to news stories, and we typically only [...]
Business Development | Social Media Literacy | GTD and Productivity Workflow
2 Sep 09 at 1:07 am
[...] The 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get at Newsless.org « links for 2009-08-29 [...]
links for 2009-09-02 » deea // supermagnet
2 Sep 09 at 2:03 am
[...] Thompson writes an excellent blog post explaining the 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get. I encourage you to read the whole thing. (thanks to @jayrosen_nyu for the heads [...]
The missing parts of daily journalism | Bryan Murley
2 Sep 09 at 3:25 pm
[...] I have a lot of appreciation for what Matt Thompson is doing at Newsless, his blog on improving journalism on the Web. So, it’s with respect that I offer a few thoughts on his post, “The 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get.” [...]
A category error - Dave Herrera (.org)
6 Sep 09 at 11:14 pm
[...] descrito Matt Thompson, en Newsless.org, las tres claves básicas imprescindibles para el periodismo: (1) la [...]
Periodismo a 400.000 dólares : DanielTercero.net
10 Sep 09 at 4:12 pm
[...] Matt Thompson talks about The 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get. [...]
Link Roundup For 12 September 2009 » paultevis.com
12 Sep 09 at 5:50 pm
[...] now, a must read. Matt Thompson on Three keys parts of news stories you usually don’t get: As long as the news is structured solely around what just happened, journalists are going to be [...]
Three keys parts of news stories we don’t get | Allison Buchan-Terrell
23 Sep 09 at 7:25 pm
[...] and the newsy updates together, because we need both. That’s what Matt Thompson’s post, “The three key parts of news stories you usually don’t get,” is about. Shifts in [...]
Rebooting the News #22 « Rebooting The News
28 Oct 09 at 7:59 pm
[...] to this idea Matt Thompson’s post, “The 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get,” and Pressthink, National [...]
Rebooting the News #24 « Rebooting The News
28 Oct 09 at 10:46 pm
[...] The 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get [...]
Notes from #NCMC09: “Defining What’s Good in Digital Journalism” (Friday, 9 a.m.) | CoPress
30 Oct 09 at 4:08 pm
[...] The 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get Newsless.org | August 19, 2009 Matt Thompson writes that although news stories always tell us what just happened, they tend to be less reliable at providing context and meaning. Quote: As long as the news is structured solely around what just happened, journalists are going to be fighting a rough battle. With a latest-news-only approach, we stoke demand for journalism by trying to snag people’s attention with each new development. There’s another way, one that leads to a more informed and more loyal public, and allows us to do better work. [...]
Verification, context and “slow news” : ErikGable.com
9 Nov 09 at 12:30 am