Newsless.org

As panic over the fate of journalism in America reaches a fever pitch, I’m dismayed how much of it continues in this ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ dichotomy that I thought had ended with the ‘who’s a journalist’ wars. I’m still reading criticisms of bloggers who don’t do any original reporting, or reporters whose work doesn’t match their professed standards of objectivity. In my darker moments, I’ll confess to thinking sinister thoughts about cable news personalities who engorge the public with an endless stream of trivia.

As we confront what we’ve lost in the decades-long contraction of the newspaper industry, and as we begin to figure out what we needed but never had, we have to reframe this conversation in purely first-person terms. It’s our society that has to evolve a journalism ecosystem to meet its information needs. It’s a bit of a forehead-slapper to write this, but we’re all in this together, folks.

I thought about this as I read Paul Starr’s excellent report on the decline of the traditional press and Yochai Benkler’s equally excellent rebuttal. Starr’s story is peppered with a panoply of thems; each section invokes the familiar faceless hordes that have long lent authority to news accounts — “some observers,” “many journalists,” “some critics.” That trope has been the downfall of many a news story, given that it’s often used to set up either a straw man or a he-said-she-said moment. The most effective elements of Benkler’s response draw on his tendency to recast those moments with an “I,” “we” or “our.” As in, “I think we do not have good research to know whether this system is also working for local politics and potential corruption as well. This, as Starr shows, is an important area we need to study and understand.” That “we” is universal; it’s any of us. It suggests any citizen might (must!) play a role in understanding this gap.

If a central element of the undoing of the traditional press is unbundling — the diminishing power of jointly packaging advertising and news, the atomization of formerly coherent monopoly news products into info-snippets on blogs and aggregators — a central element of journalism’s renewal will be connection — our ability and responsibility to all play shifting, complementary roles in a potentially vast system of journalism.

Today I’ve seen plenty of variants on a remark about Jon Stewart’s evisceration of Jim Cramer: “Why didn’t a journalist do that?” Answer: Because the role Stewart played is no longer reserved for journalists, if it ever was. Any of us can unleash a devastating act of media criticism, as Stewart did, or re-tweet such an act where and when we find it.

In all the coverage I read about growth and development in Columbia, Mo., the most significant investigative package didn’t come from the Missourian or the Tribune. It was a pair of studies done by citizen activist and university professor Ben Londeree, conducted with all the rigor of an academic. Londeree sought an answer to the question of how much it cost Columbia to hook new developments up to water and sewer connections, roads, and other infrastructure, as compared with the fees the city exacts from developers for their projects. Working with an activist group called the Smart Growth Coalition, he surveyed 40 Midwestern cities (.doc) to get an average of similar costs and fees elsewhere, to see how Columbia stacked up. Then, he compiled a dizzying array of variables specific to Columbia to estimate a figure for the city. And he was transparent about his methodology:

Community websites were studied to obtain as much information as possible about these financing issues. Some websites either didn’t have the information needed for the survey or I was unable to locate it. The most difficult to pin down is the category of exactions for off-site infrastructure because these typically are negotiated at the time of annexation, rezoning, or plan approval.

After the website search, the data were e-mailed to each community’s CEO (mayor or city manager) to verify for accuracy and completeness. A second request was e-mailed to non-responders about four weeks later. Since many still did not reply, telephone calls were made to planning departments and public works departments with excellent cooperation. In several cases, these calls helped to identify additional fees charged by a separate entity such as the county, metropolitan districts, benefit districts, co-ops, and private utilities.

As it happened, Londeree’s studies got quite a bit of local press. The next few years would see the Smart Growth Coalition expand its profile in Columbia city government. Advocates of the coalition’s ideas have now won four out of seven seats on the City Council.

Maybe once upon a time a group of reporters would have beaten Londeree to the punch, or replicated and extended his work to give it that journalistic seal of approval. We’re not in that world anymore. Our society’s welfare will increasingly depend on citizens taking on work that ambitious, as members of non-profits, for-profits, universities, knitting clubs, and every other type of organization out there. And it will depend equally on our ability to evaluate the work not by who did it — not whether it was “us” or “them” — but by how it was done.

Ezra Klein blogged yesterday about what he calls “one of the more frustrating tensions in political journalism,” riffing off this quote from the NYT’s Matt Bai:

Generally speaking, political writers don’t think so much of political scientists, either, mostly because anyone who has ever actually worked in or covered politics can tell you that, whatever else it may be, a science isn’t one of them. Politics is, after all, the business of humans attempting to triumph over their own disorder, insecurity, competitiveness, arrogance, and infidelity; make all the equations you want, but a lot of politics is simply tactile and visual, rather than empirical. My dinnertime conversation with three Iowans may not add up to a reliable portrait of the national consensus, but it’s often more illuminating than the dissertations of academics whose idea of seeing America is a trip to the local Bed, Bath & Beyond.

Klein makes a wonderful point:

Obviously, that doesn’t make much sense. Matt Bai’s conversations with those three Iowans would have gone fairly far towards explaining what those three Iowans thought was driving their vote. But though people don’t tell themselves that they’re tribal creatures who rationalize their attachments and make judgments based on the state of macroeconomic indicators, that explanation fits the data a lot better than anything Bai would have heard over dinner. Indeed, imagine those were Democratic Iowans. In 2004, they would have told Bai that they really believed it important to have a former war hero leading the nation in these times of peril and crisis. In 2008, that wouldn’t have been important to them at all, and instead, they’d have been more interested in a new direction and something called “change.” What people tell you about their vote often tells you a lot more about what they’ve been told about their vote than about why they’re voting the way they are.

But Bai’s piece does lay bare the journalistic tendency to prize “talking to people about stuff” over “learning about stuff.” If I call up Peter Orszag and ask him about the budget outlook, I’m “reporting.” So too if I attend a press conference and listen to other people ask Peter Orszag about the budget outlook. But if I spend a couple hours at my desk reading CBO and OMB documents, I’m not “reporting.” I’m researching. And to get an idea of how the guild distinguishes between the two, note that though a lot of journalists call themselves “reporters,” none call themselves “researchers.”

If this democracy business is going to work out in the long run, all the “us”es of world are going to have to stop sorting people into “them”s and snorting at them. That goes double for journalists.

As this all shakes out, I am confident we will emerge with a corps of individuals who claim journalism as their livelihood. Some small segment will be Sy Hersh-ian muckrakers, rock stars and outliers, stalking through shadowy worlds to singlehandedly expose untold corruptions. But many of them will be Josh Marshalls, for whom investigative journalism could not be done without a thousand engaged citizens each doing a tiny piece of it, and ten thousand more ponying up ten dollars in support of it.

Just as newspapers have lost their monopolies on their audiences, journalists have lost a monopoly on journalism. The responsibility for gathering information and evaluating it has spread throughout the citizenry. We have to figure out how to make that work. All of us. I’m confident we will.

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been steeped in hundreds of pages of coverage of growth and development in Columbia, MO. The articles I’ve been reading came from the Columbia Missourian and the Columbia Daily Tribune; I read them in chronological order from 2001 to now.

I’m beginning to question an assumption I’ve never really articulated, but always held. I’ve long assumed that if you followed the news, the stories behind the headlines would become plain. By reading your newspaper over time, you’d develop a high-level understanding of the issues. You’d have an idea of the characters involved, the dilemmas at hand, the consensus facts, etc. You’ll be armed with the information you need to make decisions on how to advance your society.

But as I immerse myself in this coverage, I’m starting to suspect it’s not so. I’m taking the most linear approach possible to following the news: reading years of relevant stories strung end-to-end in order. I should be the Platonic ideal of the well-informed citizen. Yet many vital questions remain unanswered.

I can tell you the names, affiliations and positions of all the key players. I can cite a number of City Council ordinances and infrastructure financing studies. I’ve taken more than 30 pages of notes on my Kindle. But all this knowledge only amounts to an awareness of the events that have transpired in growth and development in Columbia. To feel truly and properly informed, I need to understand what these events mean. But I can’t tell you that at all.

For example, a dispute has long been simmering between developers who say they contribute a fair amount to the funds needed to support infrastructure in Columbia and a group of residents who say the developers aren’t pulling their weight. Developers claim their contributions match those of developers in other similar communities. The residents say the city shoulders an extraordinarily high share of the burden. Each side offers perfectly testable claims. But I have absolutely no idea where the balance of evidence falls.

Devil’s Advocate Matt: Maybe what you’re talking about is just bad journalism. If the reporters and editors were doing their jobs, you’d feel like a properly-informed citizen after all that reading. But your experience in this instance can’t really be generalized to the industry at large.

Perhaps, but I have a strong suspicion that the coverage in the Tribune and the Missourian meets all the standards by which we typically evaluate journalism. The individual articles balance the claims of advocates on all sides and bring in independent testimony where appropriate. At an article-by-article level, the papers do a perfectly respectable job of encapsulating the relevant context.

The real questions seep in at a higher level. Fundamental claims, positions and assumptions remain untested, persisting after all the city council ordinances and the bond elections. The consequences of the events in the headlines seem to go unexamined. Developers warn that if voters enact higher fees for development, it will suppress growth and the costs will be passed on to homeowners anyway. Did it happen? Did the warnings come true? I can’t tell you. I have a lingering host of questions like those.

I don’t think the reason the newspapers haven’t answered these questions is because they’re bad journalists. I think it’s chiefly because these questions are obscured by the scale of coverage. If we think of ourselves as covering a bond issue, we’ll focus mostly on how claims and counter-claims relate to that issue. When the voters decide the issue, our work is done. On the other hand, if we think of ourselves as covering how growth is financed, we’ll try to get to the bottom of that question. We just don’t tend to think of ourselves that way.

Devil’s Advocate Matt: Aren’t you applying greater expectations than journalism can fulfill? After all, sometimes the role of journalism isn’t to provide the answers, but to lay out the questions. At least now you know enough to ask the right questions. Besides, reality is too messy to be digested into info-nuggets. Your frustration just shows that the journalists have done a good job of capturing the knotty nature of the problems at hand.

OK, but that’s super-lame. I’m saying I put in all this effort to get more informed, but in the end I actually feel less informed. If that’s the case, why the heck should I follow the news? And how am I supposed to get the answers? Should I keep reading with a dim hope that all this information will spontaneously click together into knowledge? Keep in mind, I just digested eight years of coverage. If the end result is merely a greater understanding that all this stuff is complicated, I’m having trouble finding the value here.

After doing this reading, I am confident of a few things. One is that we are perfectly capable of distilling much of my reading into something more coherent and engaging without discarding too much valuable nuance. Another is that doing so will reveal all sorts of important questions we didn’t answer.

And these questions aren’t unanswerable philosophical dilemmas. They’re relatively straightforward, and they have perfectly concrete answers. It’s just that we haven’t pursued or supplied those answers, because we’ve concentrated our attention on smaller questions.

Devil’s Advocate Matt: When you throw around phrases such as “high-level understanding” and statements such as “I need to know what these events mean,” don’t you worry that you’re asking reporters to artificially impose a conceptual frame onto a reality that might not merit it? How can you be sure you’re not just forcing events to conform to your agenda, or cherry-picking events that suit the framework you’ve laid out?

Two points. First, not to rehash the myth of objectivity, but I don’t buy that there isn’t already a conceptual frame at work here. Our mental models determine how stories get covered and how much, who we talk to, what information we include and exclude. There are reasons we think the stuff we select is important. I think we stand to gain a lot by articulating those models explicitly.

Second, it takes a lot of reporting to deliver what I’d call a “high-level understanding” of any issue. I can confidently conclude from my reading that common themes and questions have continued popping up over the past several years in Columbia, and that these themes and questions are important, and that we can weave interesting stories out of them. My talks with editors at the Missourian reinforce these conclusions. I don’t think that distilling the news for an audience that can’t be as engaged as we are diminishes our reporting in any way; in fact, I think it makes our reporting much more valuable.

The question that titles this post is purposely provocative. I can rattle off any number of issues for which I feel my understanding’s been enhanced because I load up the New York Times every day. Yes, on some level, following the news works. I want to make it work better, on a bigger level.

I’ve been mum for the past week because I’ve been working through some thoughts on transparency that have been threatening to turn into one spiraling, omnibus post. But I think these thoughts might cohere better if I break them up. So here’s a start:

Assumption: Whatever the information ecosystem of the future looks like, it will involve more people taking more responsibility for producing and filtering their own media.

Consequently, let’s posit that these folks might benefit from knowing some of the better techniques journalists have refined for evaluating and presenting information. Let’s also suppose that this knowledge is not already widespread, largely because we’ve muddied it up with a lot of pointless conventions that obscure some of the best components of the journalistic process.¹

What I’m getting at is the notion that journalists are acquiring a growing responsibility to let our communities in on how we do our work, for reasons that have little to do with the transparency battles of yesteryear. Increasingly, transparency is an instrument not just for enhancing the credibility of our journalism, but especially for informing an audience that might want to extend or repeat or improve it.

One of the least-remarked-upon aspects of the best journalistic blogging is how much it demystifies the process of journalism. The work that earned Josh Marshall and company a Polk Award seems so humble and accessible in retrospect. Follow the dots the TPM crew connects as they start to unearth the extent of the story, and you might just begin to believe you could do something like this yourself. The very tone of the coverage invites participation. From 1/15/07:

Strange days? Less than a week after news broke that the Bush administration has forced the resignation of San Diego U.S. attorney Carole Lam, we learn that it has done the same to Daniel Bogden, U.S. attorney for Nevada.

According to today’s Las Vegas Review-Journal, no one seems to know why he’s been asked to leave before his term expires in 2008. As in Lam’s ouster, there appear to be no charges of wrongdoing against Bogden.

There’s a question mark here. There’s an implied mystery — “no one seems to know.” The blogger has told us why the story piques his curiosity, what he knows and where he learned it, and what he hopes to find out next. Meanwhile, his fellow muckrakers — in the best muckrakish tradition — are breathlessly promising “More soon!”²

Notice that transparency doesn’t obfuscate narrative here, it facilitates it. The way the TPM reporters frame
their work makes you want to know what happens next. In the past, we’ve envisioned transparency as a cumbersome add-on to the reporting and storytelling process (e.g. a “How we reported the story” sidebar). Bloggers have shown that it doesn’t have to be that way.

Contrast the TPM blogging with the first New York Times story to hint at the scandal, published five days after Josh Marshall’s muckrakers started to smell a rat. That story is a black box, arriving as a seamless package of factory-assembled facts, with no history or future.

My hunch is that journalists will do ourselves and our societies a favor by building on the approach demonstrated by TPM and other bloggers inside and outside of Big Media. If we do our part to spread knowledge about how we acquire and evaluate information, we make it likelier that our audiences will consider that knowledge as they do the same. Exposing our methods in a more open fashion might allow them to be criticized, but who’s to say those critiques won’t help us improve those methods?

For these reasons and others, I intend to ask the reporters working on the prototype to blog their progress as they gather and filter information for the site. Of course, the blog will also be a forum (not the only one, I think) for the community of people deeply interested in the topics we’ll be covering.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t expect that just because we blog transparently, folks will magically start turning into journalistic savants right and left. But I do think it’s an important piece of how journalism should change. More (!) on this forthcoming.

1. Like, for example, our unwillingness to use the first person, which produces a stilted, distancing prose in its best moments, and actually misleads or confuses in its worst. Or our insistence on he-said/she-said journalism, which continues to be a significant black mark on our coverage of some of the most important issues of our era, such as climate change. Or our recent nonsensical contention that good journalism was somehow antithetical to blogging, which means moments like this just serve us right. We’ve expended so much energy upholding such superficial conventions as being somehow useful for evaluating what constitutes authentic journalism, that we’re shocked to discover how easily those conventions are aped and our public deceived. [↩]
2. Marshall has a practical reason for this approach: his brand of reporting relies on audience participation. If the Talking Points Memo community wasn’t tipping him off to reports of attorneys being dismissed across the country, it would have been much more difficult for him to piece the story together. [↩]

I’m operating under a number of assumptions as I undertake this research. I’ve articulated one of them — that an increase in understanding of a news topic might also increase our appetite for further information on that topic. Now, building off of yesterday’s post, let me articulate another:

I believe every news event represents a data point in a larger story.

We recognize this in obvious cases — McCain calling for a delayed debate is a node in the story of the $700B bailout plan, which is a node in the story of the financial crisis, etc. But we don’t apply this logic consistently to the smaller news events that decorate our sites daily.

I’m looking at the local section on StarTribune.com. There’s a headline about a kid who got shot in a bar. Just a few headlines down, there’s one grimly commemorating a pair of shootings at a local high school. Further down, we read about a young woman found shot to death in her boyfriend’s car.

We treat these events as separate, self-contained stories. To the extent we ever connect the dots of the larger stories in play — gun violence; premature deaths among youths — it’s rather oblique. At most, the incidents might find their way onto a homicide map. But if we recognized the place each event holds in a larger story, over time the connections will become plain.

Maybe the radical suggestion here is that every news event is similarly connected. The traffic jam caused by an accident on the highway seems like a momentary, disconnected thing, but even that near-daily occurrence is a data point in a larger story about why, where and when accidents occur. I’ve long wondered why every citizen doesn’t have access to a Google map of all her city’s roads, filterable by time and date, showing what have been the most accident-prone intersections and times to drive in her city. It’s not as though we don’t have this information, or that the information wouldn’t be valuable. Which brings me to another assumption:

That larger story is the more important one to tell.

Don’t get me wrong, stories about individual moments and people are important to conveying any larger narrative. To convey the incompetent planning for the war in Iraq, Rajiv Chandrasekaran didn’t just cite statistics or draw graphs, he wove together a pastiche of human stories. But we should keep our eye on the ball. It’s less important for our audience to know about a particular shooting in a bar than it is for them to know how gun violence affects their city and what causes it.

And while knowing about an accident on a highway fills an important need to know which road to take to work, common knowledge of the circumstances under which such accidents occur could help us avoid them in the first place.

At UNITY this year, I attended an amazing panel on how to sustain investigative journalism during this time of crisis in the news industry. The most impressive panelist was a woman named Renee Ferguson, an award-winning reporter from KMAQ-TV in Chicago. She related this anecdote:

“The other day, our chopper reporter covered a fire. It was a fire in [a storage facility]. Just kind of as an aside, he said, ‘There was a family living in here, but when the roof caved in, they got out OK, no problem.’ And I said, ‘A family living in a storage locker?’

That day, we set out to find families living in storage lockers. You will not believe how many families are living in storage lockers. They are air-conditioned, they are safe, they are clean, and people are living in them. And in Chicago, it was so easy to do this story. In a day. It took us a day. And it started with a fire.”

Listening to Renee, I realized that her strength as an investigator was her pattern recognition, the ability to tie little stories together into larger ones. It lent weight to my conclusion that moving from little-j journalism to big-J Journalism isn’t necessarily a matter of spending more money or producing 90-inch stories. It’s about connecting the dots. Telling the larger story.

Jay Rosen’s been on something of a tear recently over the notion that news sites should be paying much more attention to the explanatory function behind their journalism. After having been somewhat indifferent to stories about the subprime crisis and its effects on the lending industry, Jay heard the “Giant Pool of Money” episode of This American Life. The episode gave him an entertaining yet comprehensive understanding of the crisis, and he found himself seeking out more news on the topic.

By explaining the background of the story to Jay, TAL had made him a consumer for more information about the story. Jay’s conclusion:

If the providers of information aren’t providing the basic explainers that turn people into customers for that information, they don’t deserve those customers and won’t retain them. If explanation is required for information acquisition, then the explainer comes “before” the informer as a pre-requisite. We typically have it the other way around.

So as we think about new models for news we need to think about expanding that little what’s this? feature you sometimes see on effective web sites. That’s not about web design. That’s a whole category in journalism that I fear we do not understand at all.

This conclusion is central to my research. I think there’s a giant realm of news stories our audiences don’t understand enough to be interested in them. To an extent, of course, that’ll always be true. But rather than continuously attempt to enlarge the audience for a given story, we pitch our stories only to the fraction of our audience that already understands the context.

What if we make it easy for our audience to get quickly up to speed on any topic? (And by “easy,” I don’t just mean a collection of our headlines on a given story. I’m talking more this speed.) Could we expand the audience for more of our coverage?

I suspect we could.