Newsless.org

I’m working my way through a few hundred pages of reading on growth and development in Columbia, so forgive the quiet. Meanwhile, I haven’t done a consensus post in a while. But I happened upon this post from Zac Echola in my RSS reader today:

I’m going to be blunt, so pardon my French (again): Yes, I’m suggesting we may be completely fucking wrong with the entire system of news. Right now, when a story breaks, it breaks like a wave. Over a period of time, it rises in interest and discussion, peaks and then drops down until the next break comes.  We do this over and over again, forcing readers to surf these waves, be they big national stories or be they hyperlocal news breaks, it doesn’t matter. The format is the same: A never ending flow of new information. Nobody questions its validity as a methodology. But it is, in fact, a staple of old media systems.

I hope to type up a few thoughts later today that are popping up as I do my reading. For now, welcome Zac to the growing chorus of voices calling for much more attention to context.

Update: I published this with a different quote. On reflection, I liked the one above better.

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.

The past week has been a hectic one, between being a good host, polishing off a News Challenge grant application, attending a daylong symposium on CMSes led by these folks, feverishly refreshing my “election ‘08 rock stars” folder in Google Reader, and spending much of yesterday brainstorming about news site structure with my fellow Fellow Jane Stevens.

More consensus, by way of Newsmaven and Journerdism:

• Paul Gillin’s on board: “In the old days, publishing was the end of a process; today, it’s the beginning. Once a story is published, it’s subject to enhancement, analysis, commentary and updates. Journalists need to be ready for the likelihood that they may be called upon to revise and develop a story long after it’s been published. It’s the Wikipedia model gone mainstream. Stories never die as long as there’s some who’s still interested in them.”
• Google’s Marissa Mayer is on board: She echoes what Google senior adviser Richard Gingras had said about the article becoming the atomic unit of news consumption. My quibbles with that contention persist.

The Christian Science Monitor, now in training to become a newsmagazine, sounds like it’s not fully on board yet, but it’s beginning the pre-boarding process:

[CSM editor John] Yemma said he sees planning some of the pieces for the weekly in a way that helps create topics pages for the Web site. For instance, the prototype of the new magazine has a cover story called the “Putin Generation.” That piece would eventually slide onto the topics page of CSMonitor.com for Russia.

“In a sense, the magazine helps us kind of create, over time, a sort of Monitor encyclopedia of the world that will be a living encyclopedia,” he said. “The web is about relatively short, relatively fast updates. The magazine is more in-depth and the two work together on the Web.”

Happy Halloween, Newsless readers. I’ll be dressing up as Jeremiah Wright tonight.

Jeff Jarvis is on board. So on board, in fact, he’s practically in the tank. Before you read his post, you should know that I neither paid him nor possessed him. A taste:

The story was all we had before — it’s what would fit onto a newspaper page or into a broadcast show. But a discrete and serial series of articles over days cannot adequately cover the complex stories going on now nor can they properly inform the public. There’s too much repetition. Too little explanation. The knowledge is not cumulative. Each instance is necessarily shallow. And when more big stories come — as they have lately! — in scarce time and space and with scarce resources, each becomes even shallower. We never catch up, we never get smarter. Articles perpetuate a Ground Hog Day kind of journalism. [Cf. "The article is not the story," 9/23]…

I want a page, a site, a thing that is created, curated, edited, and discussed. It’s a blog that treats a topic as an ongoing and cumulative process of learning, digging, correcting, asking, answering. It’s also a wiki that keeps a snapshot of the latest knowledge and background. It’s an aggregator that provides annotated links to experts, coverage, opinion, perspective, source material. It’s a discussion that doesn’t just blather but that tries to accomplish something (an extension of an article like this one that asks what options there are to bailout a bailout). It’s collaborative and distributed and open but organized.

Think of it as being inside a beat reporter’s head, while also sitting at a table with all the experts who inform that reporter, as everyone there can hear and answer questions asked from the rest of the room — and in front of them all are links to more and ever-better information and understanding. [Cf. "Give a reporter five minutes," 9/8] …

What do we call it? I don’t know. The topic table. The beat bliki (ouch).¹ The news brain. We’ll know what to call it when we see it. [Cf. "What is Wikipedia?: Or, the 1991 problem," 9/18]

If you’re wondering why I’ve been so zealous in tracking these likeminded expressions, it’s because I think we’re on the verge of an epochal advancement in journalism. We’ve spoken for years about the radical evolution that must take place, but I think our ideas are only now matching our ambitions. In recent years, our craft has gotten quicker and glitzier and slightly more in touch, but all our progress has been incremental. Now, the paradigm shift is finally at hand. A few months ago, Malcolm Gladwell popularized this notion that great insights very often strike a number of people seemingly at once. He said:

This phenomenon of simultaneous discovery—what science historians call “multiples”—turns out to be extremely common. One of the first comprehensive lists of multiples was put together by William Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas, in 1922, and they found a hundred and forty-eight major scientific discoveries that fit the multiple pattern. Newton and Leibniz both discovered calculus. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace both discovered evolution. Three mathematicians “invented” decimal fractions. Oxygen was discovered by Joseph Priestley, in Wiltshire, in 1774, and by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, in Uppsala, a year earlier. Color photography was invented at the same time by Charles Cros and by Louis Ducos du Hauron, in France. Logarithms were invented by John Napier and Henry Briggs in Britain, and by Joost Bürgi in Switzerland.

Many smart people are coming to the same conclusion about what the shape of journalism should be. The reason the consensus tag dwarfs any other here on Newsless is that I want to pluck this pattern from the zeitgeist. In my research proposal, I said:

From my vantage point having worked in online newsrooms and spoken with leaders across the industry at conferences, I have a strong hunch that this idea is the embodiment of what we ultimately hope to create. But in newspapers, at least, we have been working backwards, slowly trying to extend our context of “daily news” into a context that is both timelier and more timeless.

Part of what I meant by that last bit was what Jeff says here: “I think the new building block of journalism needs to be the topic. I don’t mean that in the context of news site topic pages, which are just catalogues of links built to kiss up to Google SEO. Those are merely collections of articles, and articles are inadequate.” Working in online news for the past several years has been a slow process of realizing that yes, articles are inadequate. At the Star Tribune, we spent months trying to move towards what the New York Times has done with Times Topics. Vendors courted us by the bucketful, promising to do the same thing using sophisticated algorithms.² We pursued this vision half-heartedly, but other priorities crowded it out. I think we realized (I know I had) that the topic pages — basically slightly flashier search results — were an uninspiring end-game. But nobody had articulated a better one. Now we’re starting to.

1. Incidentally, I was up late last night, lying in bed, searching Google from my cell phone for a Wordpress plugin that mimics the functionality of Wikipedia. (I’m still searching for the software framework that’ll house this prototype. More on that later.) One of the vaporware plugins that kept coming up was called … wait for it … blicki. [↩]
2. A commenter on Jeff’s post makes a point I’ve started making a lot in recent talks: part of the problem of articulating this vision is that we still think machines are going to do this for us. Somehow, we’ll just put the information out there, and some algorithm will pull it together beautifully. I’m now convinced that humans will play a much more hands-on role in this than we thought. [↩]

This, via Journalism Hope, is a pretty hefty endorsement:

[Google senior adviser Richard] Gingras urges editors to take a lesson from Wikipedia’s redefinition of the encyclopedia.Although it has no original reporting, Wikipedia is becoming a popular source for news. To illustrate this, Gingras shows a recent Google search on the anthrax attacks. The first result: a Wikipedia article. The second: The site of a man who has been researching and following the case for several years. People are going to these sites, and referring others to them, in large enough numbers to drive them to the top of page rankings, he says.

The Wikipedia article is nearly 5,000 words and also has multiple sources linked. On big news stories, Gingras argues, Wikipedia’s contributors usually go a good job of pulling together a lot of reliable material — often from newspaper sites — and updating it continually.

See, even Google thinks Wikipedia offers news editors a model to examine. Although I’d quibble with this:

He offers a premise: the atomic unit of news content has changed. That’s what happened with music. Until a few years ago, the atomic unit of music was albums. But with the development of mp3, it became the song. “It’s not about your site, it’s about the article,” Gingras says.

I’d argue that the article (and the mp3) is a molecular unit. Right now, I’d say the fact (and, extending the analogy, the sample) is the atomic unit of news. More on that in a few minutes …

This fellow’s on board. And Howard Weaver gives a shout-out, although he says, “I haven’t got my brain completely around it yet.”

Neither have I, of course, which is why I’m at RJI.

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.

This month’s editorial:

What if newspapers—if they are destined to be niche reads—took those young readers at their word and claimed the depth-and-knowledge niche and sold that? Despite their diminished resources, they could still dominate the field. Such a niche could even fit with a hyperlocal approach. Lee Abrams strikes us as an enthusiastic salesman—we’d love to see what he could do with a product that readers both want and need.

Nice.

Every local newspaper should become an evolving resource online. In addition to covering incremental stories, on the Internet we can and should build presentations that place the latest developments in the context of the longterm story arc.