Five concrete steps to improving the news
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:
- 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?
- 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.
* * *
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.
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Some context for comment: A recent CNN article on the California wildfires offers additional context on fighting fires, the science of fires, and how fires spread. http://edition.cnn.com/2009/US/09/01/california.wildfires/#cnnSTCOther2
Too bad they don’t have an “explainer” section for “Healthcare in America”.
Oh wait — they do. Can you find it?
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2009/health.care/
Jeannienu
1 Sep 09 at 1:33 pm
I loved your original piece and wrote about it on my blog — but also bit my tongue because my experience as a source for news stories has been that most reporters were simply too out of their depth to be able to accomplish your point 5 here: Learn the issue inside and out.
Mostly they don’t contextualize because they can’t. They can’t tell you how they learned what they write about because they’ve only described the first surface of the complex elephant they blundered up against in the dark…
I’ve met some who do know their subjects — for example, recently the guy on the religion beat for the LA Times. (I mention him because I know that might seem obscure — but it is in the weedy subjects that expertise if most needed.) That reporter spent hours checking whether he had really mastered the events he sought to describe.
Hardly any journalists seem to get the opportunity to learn their subjects well enough to produce reporting that seems accurate to folks who actually know the subject. That seems an economic reality of any imaginable journalism.
janinsanfran
1 Sep 09 at 3:08 pm
A question. So obviously, you think (and I agree) that taking these steps will result in better news.
Do you also think that taking these steps will result in more successful news sites — e.g. with more unique users, more page views, deeper engagement, etc.? If so, how much more?
The answer doesn’t necessarily have to be yes; context and traffic might not be linked in any significant way. But I’m just curious to hear your thinking on it.
Robin
1 Sep 09 at 4:15 pm
Thanks Jan. I agree, a lot of reporters simply don’t know their subjects well enough. I had a long conversation with a metro editor friend of mine about this.
Another thing that cuts against this, though, is the popularity of generalized reporters. Beat reporters are expected to cultivate this sort of deep, focused knowledge, and several do, but much of our news infrastructure is oriented around the idea that anyone can just cover anything. Television news especially traffics in general-interest information. Few broadcast reporters can cultivate the expertise that would allow them to properly contextualize most of their stories.
But I say this leaves a wide advantage — and no excuses — for beat reporters. And there’s nothing that says a local news organization can’t take on the national orgs for contextual coverage of some national issues.
Matt
1 Sep 09 at 6:10 pm
Good question, Robin! My answer is “Sort of.”
When you say “more successful news sites,” I think we’ve got to recalibrate our notion of what constitutes success. Right now, you might be a general-assignment reporter for a newspaper, whose stories on local crimes, early-morning traffic accidents, random press releases and the like occasionally find an audience of a few thousand people. In the aggregate, let’s say your stories are click-fodder for 50,000 unique users over the course of a month, and maybe 150,000 pageviews, a few thousand comments, etc.
From what I’ve discovered, here’s the problem with the traffic you’ve accrued: it’s not worth all that much. It’s unpredictable (i.e. it’s difficult to forecast and consequently sell); it accrues to categories that don’t draw a premium from advertisers (traffic, crime, etc.), and the types of users looking for this news aren’t really seeking a relationship with their news site, just a one-morning stand. (So you can’t do much in the way of demographic targeting to these users, ’cause they probably don’t want to give you their registration info.)
The only way we can monetize this audience is in volume, so we’re seeking quantity from you, not quality. Write more stories, quicker. They’re crappy-ass, hyper-commoditized stories, but every now and then they find their way to the most-read column. Your audience hangs by a thread; the slightest hurdle to reading your information might send them away.
On the other hand, you’re a beat reporter who’s built a solid (and growing) constituency among an engaged segment of readers deeply interested in your topic. They read your stuff because you help them understand something better about the world. You’ve been administering a wiki on your topic which starts to get a tiny, but growing bit of traffic as you add pages and content and promote it from your blog. Your blog itself has a devoted fan-base of 10,000 people who read it at least three days a week. They leave wonderful comments; you start telling people that the real journalism happens in your comment threads.
With the right salesperson, you might get sponsor interest in the blog/wiki, as well as appeal to a nicely targeted group of advertisers. Your readers love you enough to answer the demographic surveys you pitch at them a few times a year.
Over the course of a year, your wiki might accrue more traffic than half of the stories written by the GA reporter that never found an audience, with just as much time spent on both sets of content. And it would be much more valuable from a revenue perspective. Over a longer period, the disparity in value might become starker still; in fact, your growing repository of content (blog archives; the wiki) might beat the GA reporter’s output for traffic with less and less work on your part.
None of these numbers are real. In real life, the GA reporter’s traffic could totally trounce that of the beat reporter’s, whether over a short spell or a long span. We might never be able to monetize the beat reporter’s work.
But I strongly suspect if we stacked the decks fairly when it came to measuring “success,” if we calculated ROI over a longer term, the beat reporter would actually come out on top.
Matt
1 Sep 09 at 7:01 pm
Great post, Matt. Even as a reporter myself, I’m always amazed whenever I hear reporters explaining issues outside of the traditional story structure (especially in interviews in venues like NPR). Their understanding of the issue tends to be so much deeper than what we actually see in their stories, and it always leads me to ask the question, “So why the heck haven’t you just explained this in one of your own stories?”
Building in primers on big local issues is something we’ve begun talking about at my paper, and I’m still trying to figure out what’s taken us so long to realize that this is a vital part of our journalistic duty. Why aren’t more news orgs churning out these explainers? Laziness? Stubbornness? Arrogance? A feeling that the audience already knows this stuff? Plain old lack of time? Whatever it is (and I suspect it’s a bit of all of the above), we’ve got to get over it and start giving people what they need.
Mark Coddington
4 Sep 09 at 11:13 am
It’s sad that we have to have this piece.Concrete Steps 1 and 5 should be in everyone’s toolkit when they start the job, but so often they’re not and we’re forced to put up will follow-the-leader journalism / reporting rather than people getting their own stories. The worst thing is that the stories people are following are barely worth the effort, but they’ve been dressed up like the proverbial silk purse from a sows ear. I think the problem goes back to basic concepts of what it is to be a reporter. Too much emphasis on the ‘glamour’ of the job and keeping up rather than what it should be -reporting.It’s easier and safer to play follow-the-leader and if everyone else has got it wrong or missing something important , “Hey why should I worry.”
Mike Birt
6 Sep 09 at 3:09 pm
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