Newsless.org

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.