My article in Nieman Reports: An Antidote for Web Overload
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.
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I think this skirts near the edge of an important point. What I think you discovered from the city editor is that the context had been left out of the stories because of the “objectivity” ethic. It was all there in editor’s head, but never made it onto the page because what the editor knew wasn’t “objective.” So as a news consumer you had no idea what was going on, really, even though the reporters and editors did know. That’s strange to think about, even though it seems to have become the norm.
Context involves conclusions about what is real, true, and actually happening. Can’t have any of that in a modern news story.
I predict that professional journalism will continue to suffer and decline until editors come to understand that their audience cares about the truth, and expects media to deliver more than stenography for rival opinions. Tell me what your editors and reporters actually know, and how they know it, and I will pay to get that.
Regards,
Stephen Lathrop
Stephen Lathrop
11 Nov 09 at 1:10 pm