Newsless.org

Last week, I had a tremendous conversation with some of the smartest folks working in the news industry about, er, “the future of context.” Despite the lofty title, we managed to have a wonderfully focused discussion. I’m still processing the innumerable nuggets of goodness to figure out which ones to start with. Meanwhile, Martin Langeveld took notes, and they’re great.

I’m often asked, “Do people really want context? Say you build out all these neat-o topic pages laying out the context behind the headlines. Do you really think anyone’s going to read that stuff?”

I say I don’t look at it as a matter of whether people want context, but when.

If you told me in July of 2007 that one of the hottest articles on StarTribune.com would be a detailed explanation of the workings of gusset plates and roller bearings in bridge engineering, I would have raised a very quizzical eyebrow. But when that bridge fell in August, gusset plates were the new Britney Spears.

Traffic to any given Wikipedia topic probably accrues over a long tail of time. Today, most folks probably have no interest in knowing about people who’ve had pies thrown at them. But chances are that over the years — probably in beer-friendly settings — a reasonable crowd of people will find themselves looking up that time Thomas Friedman dodged a pie at Brown University. Likewise, the Sarah Palin page that drew only a quiet, steady stream of interest for years suddenly lit up one day in August ‘08, for obvious reasons.

Road infrastructure financing isn’t a sexy topic. Headlines on bonds for road projects may languish unread while cute puppy photos get all the pageviews. But we’ll build and tend that road financing topic page anyway. And one day, when a bumpy ride or flattened tire has you wondering why your city has all these #$%@! potholes, we’ll be ready for you.

I’m not arguing that news organizations should create repositories of useless topics in the hope that one day some calamity will make those topics relevant. I’m saying journalists should ask themselves what’s most important for their communities to know, and cover it diligently. Not with the expectation that the coverage will draw an instant wave of traffic, but with the understanding that if it’s truly important, it will spark enough relevant news to draw a significant audience over time. And the more of that context we lay out, the more relevant we can be at any given moment. This is how we’ll begin to build relationships that matter with our communities.

By creating information assets, we make it likelier that our information will find our audiences when they want it. Consider the story of Jacqueline Dupree. One day, Jacqueline decided to start taking pictures of her a nearby neighborhood¹ to put on her website. She knew she wanted to document how the neighborhood was changing. Before long, the site had become a living history of an area in transition. Eventually, Jacqueline “reluctantly” found herself covering public meetings, publishing local data feeds, and generally creating a deeply comprehensive contextual record of the place.

Twenty months after Jacqueline began working on the site in earnest, the city announced it was building a stadium in the neighborhood. The site took off, and won a Batten Award for Innovation last year. Take a look, it’s not hard to see why.

Context as an engine for news

A focus on context also changes the definition of what we consider news. As my team creates these topic pages, we’re finding gaps in our understanding, stories that have fallen off our radar, and an infinite well of other fodder for further reporting. It turns out that when you attempt to assemble the most important information you have on a place, you begin to realize there’s no such thing as a slow news day. As I’ve said before:

Not two weeks ago, the Star Tribune’s reader representative was complaining about the midsummer absence of news. If we committed to providing regular updates on those important stories, we would be unearthing legitimate news that too often gets buried by the tyranny of recency. “Still No Action On Strengthening Levees,” the headlines might have said. “Bridges Languish in Need of Repair.” And if the warnings aren’t heeded, at least we will have traced the progress of a possible disaster before the fact, giving us unprecedented insight into what went wrong and when.

If truth is an asymptote, great journalism has no end.

The other day, Howard Weaver left a comment that seems appropriate to mention here:

For years I’ve warned newsrooms against the kind of thinking that led an educator to pronounce, “I was teaching, but they weren’t learning.” Impossible. And I think we need to embrace a similar responsibility: if 50% of the public still thinks Saddam was involved in 9-11, or that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, journalism has failed. Even if we did everything right, perfectly, by established standards, we have to be judged by the outcomes, not the inputs.

The upshot of my entire argument in this blog is that journalism’s highest purpose is delivering understanding. We don’t just cover the news for the sake of telling people what happened; we cover the news to help our communities understand themselves better, so they can improve. A story about a homicide might have some intrinsic value, but the greater value emerges when that story teaches its audience something about why homicide happens in a community and how the next one might be prevented. If we’re doing our jobs right, every such tragedy in a community becomes another hook to the larger story about how these tragedies might be stopped.

Using the news as a hook for context doesn’t mean running versions of the same story over and over again. It means reporting until we’ve exposed enough of the broader context of an issue for it to reach an audience. And when it finds that audience, it means giving them a means to discuss and debate and extend the story.

After New York Times reporter David Barstow unloaded a massive, months-long investigation into the Pentagon’s deployment of “military analysts” on television news shows last April, the news networks said nary a word. The story has since proceeded along a familiar path: Barstow wrote a follow-up story in November, trying to keep the issue in the spotlight. Another follow-up last month (the Defense Dept’s inspector general found no wrongdoing in the Pentagon propaganda program) was downgraded from the front page to A11. Any rage that boiled amongst the American people after the publication of the initial story has cooled to a simmer over time. And if someday the government is found to have launched another more insidious propaganda campaign, the New York Times will say, “We taught, but they didn’t learn.”²

I remember my own anger and disbelief when I read that original story in on NYTimes.com on the evening of April 19th, reciting aloud some of the sordid revelations to my boyfriend. I scanned the Sunday talk show transcripts the next day for mentions of the story, certain it was only a matter of time before it snowballed into a giant scandal. And when the networks were silent, I wanted more. Maybe a wiki that would trace the ongoing television appearances of all these well-compensated former generals and their connections to the defense industry. Or a Firefox plugin that could slip in a message on any page I viewed that mentioned one of the exposed “analysts” — talk about relevance.

A focus on delivering context means that the news is never the endpoint. The giant investigation doesn’t conclude with the Sunday A1 story, it erupts into something bigger. And the trail of a story doesn’t end with the passage of a bill or the resignation of an official. It doesn’t end at all. It merely connects with more and more dots that form an ever-clearer picture of a better society.

1. Correction: Jacqueline doesn’t live in the neighborhood, but just outside of it. [↩]
2. All this is not to say the story didn’t have an effect. Congress clearly got the message, and even after the inspector general’s report, the GAO and FCC are still investigating the Pentagon program. But I think the only thing that could really keep this from happening again is a sort of enduring public vigilance that never really had a chance to blossom. [↩]

The other day’s post on following the news started up a meaty little discussion. I considered posting this in that thread, but my thoughts were coalescing into a post of their own, so here it is.

I think it’s worth quoting Bill Dunphy’s reply at length:

What you’re describing is, plain and simply, bad journalism. A failure to test critical assertions in an important ongoing public issue is simply a failure to do your job as a journalist. … The failure you’re pointing to, while common, has nothing to do with the medium really, or the concept of daily (or weekly) journalism. The failure is one of quality of work.

You don’t need a damn new taxonomy or community wiki. You just need a journalist who gives a damn, and editor who cares and a paper that earns enough money that they can employ otherwise non-revenue producing people like that.

Sadly we have been failing on the first two conditions for years - and decades - and now we’re failing on the third.

I hear a contradiction here, worth highlighting because I think it’s a common contradiction in our industry’s conversation with itself. On the one hand, Bill argues that these problems in coverage are particular to the situation, not systemic — a failure of individual journalists to do their jobs. On the other hand, Bill implies that the problems are, in fact, systemic — “we” are all agents of a decades-long, system-wide failure.

Part of the reason I don’t find the individual failure argument compelling is that I just don’t think it’s true. I’m working with these editors. One of the reporters involved in the coverage showed up in the earlier thread. They are as talented and dedicated a set of professionals as any I’ve seen.

Convene a jury of decorated editors and ask them to evaluate any of the coverage I read, and I think they’d say the stories were well-written on the whole, perspectives were typically well-balanced, and the reporting was tenacious. They’d be asking themselves, “How well did the newspapers cover that sewer issue?” And they’d be answering, as would I, “Pretty well.” By the standards of the system, it was good journalism.

What I’m saying is that I think those standards — the benchmarks of success systemic to journalism — are misguided. I’m asking broader questions, such as, “How well are we advancing the debate this community is having with itself?” And by those standards, the journalism fell far short.

Look at the current debate over the financial press’ coverage leading up to the economic meltdown, and you’ll find the exact same dynamic.¹ In this casting, the American Journalism Review plays the role of my hypothetical jury of editors. The magazine examined the work of the financial press and issued a resounding thumbs-up. Numerous stories warned of the dangers of subprime lending and collateralized debt obligations. Business journalists widely acknowledged the existence of a housing bubble. By these standards, the business press should be commended for having done excellent journalism.

I’ll leave the rebuttal to CJR:

But assembling a list of good stories strikes me as a little too simple. This isn’t about individuals, after all, but news organizations and the business press as an institution. Any fair measure of press performance will have to take some measure of the record in its entirety. What was the business-press narrative about, generally speaking? What else was written about Wall Street and the financial-services industry? Who was on the covers?

Were the good stories the rule or the exception that proves it?

Like me, CJR has broadened the questions, and like me, so far they seem to find the journalism wanting. On the individual level, reporters and editors were performing splendidly. The failure is in the system.

The sunny side to systemic failures is that they pave the way for systemic solutions. I actually believe the forms that have contained journalism — the article, the general-interest news product, the “24-hour news cycle” — have made it easier for these failures to occur. I believe our attention to scoops rather than synthesis and our preference for immediacy over importance weakens our journalism. I believe our unwillingness to facilitate our communities’ conversations beyond the occasional article weakens the impact of our journalism.

But I’m hopeful some of the forms that are emerging, such as wikis and blogs, begin to introduce a sort of purpose and flexibility that might make journalism fundamentally better. Of course you don’t need a wiki to provide context. But it presents a greater bias towards context than that 9-inch news hole that’s gotta get filled this afternoon.

1. A special hat tip here to Jay Rosen, who’s been calling my attention to this phenomenon a lot over the past few months. [↩]

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.

I promised RJI’s communications director that I’d put together material for an e-mail that might be useful for the Institute’s mailing list. If you’re a regular reader, you’ll recognize many of these thoughts from my posts here, but you might still find this interesting. Happy 2009, and thanks for reading!

In the conversations about the seismic shifts rocking journalism today, much has been said about community participation in journalism, the proliferation of multimedia storytelling formats, the rise of mobile platforms and the departure of traditional advertising vehicles. Less has been said about how these developments relate to another fundamental shift in the landscape — our society’s 180-degree reversal from being starved of information to being drowned in it. But now that study after study has reinforced this fact, news industry leaders are starting to wrap their minds around adapting journalism to the overload age.

Addressing overload — weaving a mess of disconnected headlines into a coherent, compelling structure — is one of the basic premises of my work at RJI. In the inaugural entry on Newsless.org, I put it this way: “I want to hear much, much less about the future of news, and much more about the future of context. I want to shift the focus of our books and conferences from how we’ll deliver the latest developments to how we’ll help our audiences better understand the state of our world.”

As we engineer our experiment in delivering context, we’ve been asking ourselves a lot of questions to help focus our efforts. I thought I’d share some of them and invite your comments, challenges, footnotes and annexations: Read the rest of this entry »

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.

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

A bold argument: 2008 summoned the best overall election coverage I’ve ever seen.¹ That is, the nature of our current information ecoystem — a rapidly maturing blogosphere, large news organizations working to adapt, the mainstreaming of participation on the Web — brought about a dramatic step forward in election coverage this year.

Name a type of coverage or commentary citizens look for in an election year, and I bet I can make a case that it was done far better this cycle than in the recent past. Let’s walk through a few examples: Read the rest of this entry »

1. Granted, that’s not an enormous sample size. Also, although it may seem like it, I’m not actually contradicting my last post, which made the point that the coverage was incapable of matching the storytelling opportunity presented by the events of this year. That’s still true. [↩]

I got a good question last week from a grad student here at Mizzou. I thought the question and my response were worth sharing. First, the question:

I had an interesting interview with a Chemistry professor this morning.  … He thinks the Missourian, and media in general, don’t write enough stories about science.  As a Chemistry professor, he thinks the general public should hear more about the work that he does and the importance of it.  On the other hand, you can’t write a headline that says “Chemistry professor will cure cancer” since it’s not necessarily true.  He’s certainly not a fan of media “hype.”  Would producing a context-rich website include writing stories about topics we don’t usually cover, like the confusing world of chemistry, or would it simply be aimed at giving more context to the subjects we often cover?  Is “context” topic-specific, or are you looking to broaden the wide world of information that readers have access to?

My reply:

I think journalists’ inability and unwillingness to cover science properly is a huge blind spot to the profession, caused by a couple of systemic incompatibilities between the science world and journalism as it’s practiced.

I would also say that not enough science coverage is a big problem, but woefully inaccurate science coverage might be an even bigger problem. Many journalists covering science aren’t thoroughly steeped in the sciences. Even at papers like the NY Times, which might do more science coverage than any other general-interest periodical in the country, the science reporters are usually dilettantes, not specialists. I don’t think my research would do much to help that problem, except to the extent that I’m advocating for the greater involvement of non-journalists (including scientists) in journalism.

And yes, I think focusing journalism more squarely on context would help overcome the problems, although the lack of context is only part of the issue. Journalism today is built around news events – that is, discrete, high-profile occurrences. Science is essentially built around the opposite of news events – the slow, steady, procedural accumulation and refinement of knowledge.

Even still, we miss opportunities to tie science information in when news events warrant it. For example, until recently, Sarah Palin’s stump speech contained a dig about how the government wastes money on such nonsense as researching the DNA of fruit flies. Scientists howled in fury – fruit flies are considered excellent research subjects because they reproduce so much and share a good proportion of their DNA with humans. It was a teachable moment that most reporters didn’t touch.

More salient to my research, I think, is the notion that focusing on the context behind the news enables journalism to tell larger, more complex stories. I think that will inevitably mean connecting those stories to science, in many cases. So much of science relates to the stuff of daily life – language, money, nutrition, health, technology, relationships, transportation, you-name-it. Cover crime deeply enough, and you’ll end up studying sociology, psychology, anthropology, neuroscience, and probably epidemiology. And my research is all about the continual deepening and expansion of the product of journalism.

Your thoughts?