Newsless.org

Synthesis: “The combining of the constituent elements of separate material or abstract entities into a single or unified entity.”
Aggregation: “A group or mass of distinct or varied things, persons, etc. Collection into an unorganized whole.”

We’ve spent many long years urging news sites to do more aggregation. Battle won. The new motto should be: “Don’t just aggregate, synthesize.”

Jay Rosen passes along via Twitter this CJR interview with Michael Hudson on the subprime crisis. It nicely illustrates the point that the media’s penchant for one-off, disconnected articles leaves us blind to much larger, more important stories:

There were a lot of good individual stories, but the problem was that they often weren’t followed up on. Sometimes they were followed up by the news organizations that did them, but you just can’t have that much impact, even if you’re The New York Times or the Washington Post if it’s like a one-shot story and you’re the only one doing it. Other people have to jump on and look at the story, too, and look at other angles.

This connects rather nicely to the rant I posted in September about our failure to connect the dots of the financial crisis for the public. But it adds a very valuable dimension.

The approach of telling larger stories rather than simply telling more stories isn’t just designed to foster better understanding among the public. It will also drastically improve our reporting. Asking how one story connects to others helps us expose patterns that a series of disconnected articles will only obscure.

Earlier this year, I posted that I wanted to see more focused discussions about journalism’s future:

If what we want to ask is “How can we save serious, detailed, local investigative journalism?” then I suspect we can have a more focused and productive conversation if we actually asked that question. Ditto if the question is “How can we make sure the local school board meeting is covered?” When folks rightly say that there’s not going to be a one-size-fits-all answer to the problems plaguing journalism, it’s because we lack even a one-size-fits-all question. “How do we save The Newspaper?” certainly isn’t it.

I’ve been hearing fewer how-do-we-save-the-newspaper-ish questions recently, but I’m still picking up conversations like, “What’s the business model for journalism?” So I figure that instead of railing against the questions I’m not impressed by, I’ll volunteer some questions that do nag at me.

I’m interested in being somewhat methodical about this. Again, journalism isn’t science. But an effort to quantify what we might be missing (or in danger of missing) could help us focus our efforts to provide it.

What are the most valuable functions currently performed by news organizations that are imperiled by the transition to digital?

We shall bicker about the “most valuable” component of this question, but I think a little bickering now-and-then is good. More on that in a second. Meanwhile, I’m especially keen on a focus on functions, rather than institutions or processes.

How might we measure the value of these functions?

I’m very curious about this. It seems distastefully clinical, but nonetheless really intriguing. Have there been efforts to measure the value of different journalistic functions? We know a free press correlates strongly with lower corruption. Do we know whether more journalists equals less corruption? If so, is there a sort of margin of diminishing results beyond which the number of journalists per capita doesn’t matter? Does journalism training affect the equation? Is publicly-funded journalism as effective at suppressing corruption as privately-funded journalism?

Outside of corruption, are there other measurable advantages of journalism? What effect do crime reporters have on crime? Does art criticism beget better art? Without the business press, would the meltdown have been worse?

If we could begin to quantify the value journalism provides, I think we could more effectively support it. The current prevailing argument — “Without news organization X, you wouldn’t have had investigation Y” — is acquiring the flavor of Senator McCain’s POW story circa September. If we could make the case that crime coverage tends to suppress crime, we’ve got a great marketing pitch for a community to come together and find some way to support a crime reporter.

What functions have been neglected by news organizations that we should account for in this transition?

I think we digital triumphalists have done a pretty good job of pointing out many of these. Someone should start cataloguing the sorts of brand-new functions tomorrow’s journalism is already starting to perform: like creating a place for communities to coalesce around the news and helping communities organize in the midst of a crisis.

What models of support might map well to each of these functions?

If we’re serious about building a sustainable journalistic infrastructure, I think this question will get us further than almost any other. We have plenty of evidence that different journalistic functions will map better to particular support models. Investigative journalism is already beginning to incline towards a non-profit, philanthropic model. Education reporting might be given to an advertising model of some kind. If we can begin to catalogue different models functioning effectively in different situations, we might be able to answer questions like, “What options should a health industry reporter in Minneapolis pursue to acquire support?”

How should these functions evolve to meet the opportunities afforded by digital media?

Plenty of experimentation on this front is already occurring, of course. As more beats start moving online in force, I cannot wait to see what results. Crime journalism saw the beginnings of a revolution with the dawn of ChicagoCrime.org. Talking Points Memo broke new ground in investigative journalism. Which niches remain untransformed? How do we transform them?

Update: Will tweets along a couple of questions: “Is what journalists value the same thing as what ‘readers’ value?” “How can we monetize it online without it sucking, or whats the next Craigslist?”

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I missed Josh's conversation with Rick while I was at Poynter last week, but I asked Rick basically the same questions half-an-hour after Josh did. Poor Rick. :)

I just finished giving a talk about my research for the local chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. Here’s the talk:

Free video streaming by Ustream

And here’s the slideshow, if you’d like to follow along:

Since I’m all about transparency, my notes for the talk are after the jump.

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I agree wholeheartedly with Josh. More on this soon.

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This is kind of out-of-the-box, but it relates to the notion of the attention economy. And plus, it's minorly fascinating.

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Blogging will be a big component of the site we create in Columbia. Kent Fischer and Tawnell Hobbs do beat-blogging better than any other mainstream news site I've seen. (Found at BeatBlogging.org.)

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I'm remiss in not having linked to this Martin Langeveld post where he unearths a CIA document explaining the benefit of wikis to the organization. Martin draws some excellent parallels with my project.

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My memeorandum fanboying aside, I agree with Gabe Rivera - humans + computers is the sweet spot. (via journerdism)