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.

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?