Newsless.org

For the longest time, whenever I read the news, I’ve often felt the depressing sensation of lacking the background I need to understand the stories that seem truly important. Day after day would bring front pages with headlines trumpeting new developments out of city hall, and day after day I’d fruitlessly comb through the stories for an explanation of their relevance, history or import. Nut grafs seemed to provide only enough information for me to realize the story was out of my depth.

I came to think of following the news as requiring a decoder ring, attainable only through years of reading news stories and looking for patterns, accumulating knowledge like so many cereal box tops I could someday cash in for the prize of basic understanding. Meanwhile, though, with the advancements of the Web and cable news, the pace of new headlines was accelerating—from daily to minute-by-minute—and I had no idea how I’d ever begin to catch up.

In 2008, I encountered a study describing others from my generation who seemed to share my dilemma. The Associated Press had commissioned professional anthropologists to track and analyze the behavior of a group of young media consumers. Their key conclusion: “The subjects were overloaded with facts and updates and were having trouble moving more deeply into the background and resolution of news stories.”

The study’s participants seemed to respond to this ever-deepening ocean of news much like I had. We would shy away from stories that seemed to require a years-long familiarity with the news and incline instead toward ephemeral stories that didn’t take much background to understand—crime news, sports updates, celebrity gossip. This approach gave us plenty to talk about with friends, but I sensed it left us deprived of a broader understanding of a range of important issues that affect us without our knowing.

Read the rest at Nieman Reports.

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:

1. A lot of people responded, here and at Poynter where the piece was republished. I read every response I could find — in the comments, on other blogs, over e-mail. Many of the respondents said I’d articulated one (or three) of their main complaints about the news. But many of them also asked a question: How would you propose we do things differently? Did I really expect newshole-deprived newspapers to reproduce an epic, magazine-length odyssey like Atul Gawande’s?
2. Folks at major news organizations examined their health reform coverage and came to the exact same conclusion as I did. Here’s Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander: “Many [readers] have said that Post stories routinely assume a foundation of knowledge that they simply don’t have. Some said that they don’t understand basic terms like ‘public option’ or ’single payer.’ They want primers, not prognostications. And they’re craving stories on what it means for ordinary folks and their families.”

I pegged my post to the issue of health care reform, but the problems I identified pervade the vast majority of our journalism, from local issues on up. And there seems to be pretty broad consensus on the problems.

So here’s a step towards some solutions – simple, low-tech or no-tech ways journalists can begin satisfying our need for context.

1. Don’t “win the morning.” Win the story.

You might have heard about Politico’s notorious goal of “winning the morning,” i.e. finding a scoop that’ll lead each day’s news cycle. That’s great, if you’re content with your stories having about as much impact as a popular tweet. Too many of us follow Politico’s lead.

Instead, try to win the story. Aim to produce a work of journalism so excellent it’ll get passed around for weeks. Put your best storytelling chops to work on this. Try to supplant Wikipedia as the top Google result for your topic. This might not be a single article; it might be a nicely-packaged collection, a wiki, or something else you devise. The key is that it should be long-lasting and distinctive.

2. Give people a starting point online.

You know that excellent explanatory piece you produced four weeks ago as a sidebar to a big news story on your topic? Rescue it from the archives and put it in a nice, prominent place online. Link to it with a clear, compelling headline.

Pull together a page online with links to several such explanatory pieces (from your site and elsewhere), along with good, useful digests of all of them. Make it so that users don’t have to visit every link to get a picture of the story, but have places to go when they want to know more. Set a recurring reminder to check in on this page once a week. Create a shortened URL for this page and repeat it every time you cover this topic.

3. Blog.

Blogging can be one of the simplest, most engaging ways to bring folks along with your process, telling them how you acquired information and asking them for help along the way. Because a blog is a linear format that allows for sub-categories, it can be easier to follow than an archive of news stories, and often all it takes to provide a decent amount of context is a well-formed link.

Let the blog be the DVD commentary to your reporting. Refer to it wherever your stories appear. Make it clear that the blog is the place to go for those who want the inside scoop on how your process works. Then deliver. Make sure it’s written in your voice, not news voice.

Blogging does carry with it the danger that you become even more news-obsessed than you might otherwise be, so keep your eye on the ball (that is, the larger story). Check out my questions for journalists in an age of information overload if you worry about this.

4. Track the unknowns.

Keep a public list of the most important things you don’t know about your topic. Perhaps it’s an outcome or prediction that hasn’t been realized yet, maybe it’s a difficult-to-nail-down statistic, or maybe it’s just something you’re unfamiliar with. If it’s one of the latter two, ask for your community’s help, like Kevin Drum did the other day.

As things come in and out of focus as the issue develops, keep your list updated. Do this in an engaging way. Might I suggest a scorecard?

5. Learn the issue inside and out.

This is actually the most important item on my list. To give your users a sense of the longstanding facts, you have to know them yourself. If there are books available on your topic, read them. Spend a few hours talking with some experts about the subject, to get a genuine understanding of it, not a quote for a story. Try to get your users to ask you questions – whether it’s by hosting live chats, plugging your e-mail address constantly, announcing open threads at regular intervals – and work hard on finding every answer you don’t know.

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This is how I think we can start addressing these issues, but this is barely a beginning. There are a ton of practical questions about how we can shift our news industry towards satisfying our need for context. These are exactly the types of questions Jay Rosen, Tristan Harris and I intend to tackle in our session at SXSW. If you haven’t voted for that session, do it! (Anyone can vote, even if you’re not attending the conference.) I have big plans for what we’ll create for that session if it’s approved. Thanks.