Newsless.org

Longtime readers of this site probably know that I’ll be speaking on a panel at SXSW on Monday with NYU’s Jay Rosen, Apture’s Tristan Harris and paidContent’s Staci Kramer about the future of context. I trust that if you’ve been reading and you’ll be in Austin for SXSW, you’ll be in Hilton H on Monday morning at 9:30. This is a preview of my opening argument for the panel. If this seems like familiar territory for me, don’t worry, the panel is going to cover plenty of untrodden territory. And the session will be all the better if you share your thoughts and questions in the thread below. Also see Jay’s conversation-starter here.

If you’re like most people, you have a certain amount of ambient knowledge that health-care reform is happening. You pay attention to headlines, and you see a lot of stories about Nancy Pelosi saying this, or Mitch McConnell saying that. You catch a line or two about it in a Presidential address. You’ve watched some headlines about it in the evening news.

Chances are that most of the information you’ve encountered about this subject has been what I’d call episodic. Over time, you may have heard a lot about budget reconciliation, insurance premium hikes, the public option, the excise tax, the Wyden-Bennett bill, the Stupak amendment, and on and on and on. You know that Democrats are trying to do something to the health care system, but it’s either a government takeover or an insurance industry giveaway. Hard to tell.

This constant torrent of episodic information is how many of us encounter information about current events. This has been true for as long as any of us has been alive, but in the wake of the real-time Web, it’s become ever more constant and ever more torrential.

Hundreds of headlines wash over us every day. And part of why many of us engage in this flow is because we have faith that over time, this torrent of episodic knowledge is going to cohere into something more significant: a framework for genuinely understanding an issue. And we live with it ’cause it sort of works. Eventually you hear enough buzzwords like “single-payer” and “public option” and you start to feel like you can play along.

But mounting evidence indicates that this approach to information is actually totally debilitating. Faced with a flood of headlines on an ever-increasing variety of topics, we shut off. We turn to news that doesn’t require much understanding – crime, traffic, weather – or we turn off the news altogether.

It turns out that in order for information about things like the public option and budget reconciliation to be useful to you, you need a certain amount of systemic knowledge to be able to parse it. You need an intellectual framework for understanding health care reform before the episodic headlines relating to health care reform make any sense.

It further turns out that this systemic knowledge is actually a whole lot easier to provide than the episodic stuff. At the pace of daily news, health care reform seems really, really complicated. But one of the most knowledgeable journalists reporting on the health-care process has already distilled almost every health care system in the world into four essential types. It would take maybe ten minutes to fill in the details on this framework, but once you get that knowledge, it suddenly becomes a lot easier to understand the system we have in the US, and the system that the Democrats are trying to turn ours into. From there, all those headlines about “bending the curve” actually start to make sense.

Right now, the most common way the news industry attempts to impart systemic knowledge is by wedging it into our episodic reports. We’ll give you tons of stories on Congresspeople sneezing something that sounds like “reconciliation” and every time, a little ways in, we’ll say something like, “Reconciliation is a procedural tactic originally designed to speed adoption of budget resolutions through Congress.”

This is completely bass-ackwards. Journalists spend a ton of time trying to acquire the systemic knowledge we need to report an issue, yet we dribble it out in stingy bits between lots and lots of worthless, episodic updates. We do this for several reasons – high among which is your continued willingness to read story after story and watch ad after ad to get updates we could sum up in a sentence – and also high among which is the fact that we used to deal exclusively in media that are pretty rigidly bounded by time. The only way we knew how to tell the story is in terms of “What happens next?” not in terms of “What’s happening.”

These terms I’ve been using – “intellectual framework,” “systemic information,” etc. – this is what I mean when I say “context.” I’ve pitched you on the consumer benefits of context, but information creators are also slowly beginning to come around to the long-term ROI of delivering context as well, for several reasons. For one thing, our information becomes much more valuable and much more desirable to you as your framework for understanding it becomes better. Jay Rosen has astutely noted the uptick in attention to financial crisis stories after This American Life’s Giant Pool of Money episode laid out the context of the crisis. For another thing, the success of Wikipedia and the enduring popularity of items like “The Ultimate Guide to Everything You Need to Know About Social Media” has taught us there’s a real market for context. There are also significant advertising benefits to having more sophisticated structures for information than “latest updates.” We could dwell on the “why” for a long time.

But I want to use our time at SXSW to explore a more forward-pointed question: How?

For the first time, we have a medium perfectly equipped to capture and deliver both episodic and systemic information. How will these two modes of information interact on the Web? What sort of design and storytelling structures must we invent to impart context? Fundamentally, in a medium that’s not constrained by time, what is the future of the Timeless Web?

Help make our panel better. What are your thoughts, and what are your questions?

Folks are emailing/Tweeting over links to Google’s “Living Stories” prototypes, done in collaboration with the New York Times and Washington Post. I’m about to hop a plane to Amsterdam to give a talk about the future of context, in which this idea plays a prominent role (as you know), so I figure I should lend some thoughts. (Update: Had to board before I finished the post, so I’m publishing from Amsterdam. Hoi!)

First, all the organizations involved deserve props for looking beyond the current news story format. Even with all its flaws, the static news article on the Web is an overwhelmingly dominant paradigm. To reimagine it – especially from within the walls of a giant, classical institution – takes vision.

Second, it’s not the most impressive incarnation of the ideas behind it. It feels a touch austere, like the quiet tinkerings of a Google engineer’s idle hours. I say that having built something much like it (without some of the cool bits). In fact, Columbia Tomorrow probably felt the same way to the folks who viewed it – “All those big ideas, and this is the product?”

The lack of sizzle is evident in Howie Kurtz’s story about the project. He calls it “a new online tool that, well, isn’t exactly going to revolutionize journalism.” I think NYT digital CEO Martin Nisenholtz gets it about right in the Times story about the initiative: “In it,” he says, “you can see the germ of something quite interesting.”

I don’t think the fact that it’s still only a “germ” at this point diminishes the thought or work that’s gone into these efforts. We really haven’t built anything quite like this before. Inventing the future takes time! And I suspect the first time many people laid eyes on Wikipedia, their reaction was much the same: Some fancy encyclopedia you got here. Um, there’s a typo on the “List of Goonies characters” page.

So I’m tremendously heartened by the fact that influential organizations are starting to act on these ideas. Every groping step away from the conceptual and toward the concrete pushes this conversation forward. The basic question – “What might this look like?” – becomes less relevant, leaving room for bolder and more interesting questions to sprout.

Right now, the main reaction flitting around in my head is this: both Columbia Tomorrow and Google’s living stories seem, from one angle, like a retreat from Wikipedia rather than a step toward (or beyond) it. They’re tugging the radical reality of the Wikipedia topic page – pure, organized, ever-changing – back to a somewhat familiar, news-oriented frame. What if we started with a Wikipedia topic page, and began to imagine how a newsroom could improve that? How might we improve the storytelling? What might the talk page become? What would bring people back to follow the story as it progresses?

Footnote: By the way, Danny Sullivan has the best take I’ve seen, if you want a read on how “Living stories” work.

Two notable things occurred in the wake of my post the other day about the key parts of news stories you don’t usually get:

1. A lot of people responded, here and at Poynter where the piece was republished. I read every response I could find — in the comments, on other blogs, over e-mail. Many of the respondents said I’d articulated one (or three) of their main complaints about the news. But many of them also asked a question: How would you propose we do things differently? Did I really expect newshole-deprived newspapers to reproduce an epic, magazine-length odyssey like Atul Gawande’s?
2. Folks at major news organizations examined their health reform coverage and came to the exact same conclusion as I did. Here’s Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander: “Many [readers] have said that Post stories routinely assume a foundation of knowledge that they simply don’t have. Some said that they don’t understand basic terms like ‘public option’ or ’single payer.’ They want primers, not prognostications. And they’re craving stories on what it means for ordinary folks and their families.”

I pegged my post to the issue of health care reform, but the problems I identified pervade the vast majority of our journalism, from local issues on up. And there seems to be pretty broad consensus on the problems.

So here’s a step towards some solutions – simple, low-tech or no-tech ways journalists can begin satisfying our need for context.

1. Don’t “win the morning.” Win the story.

You might have heard about Politico’s notorious goal of “winning the morning,” i.e. finding a scoop that’ll lead each day’s news cycle. That’s great, if you’re content with your stories having about as much impact as a popular tweet. Too many of us follow Politico’s lead.

Instead, try to win the story. Aim to produce a work of journalism so excellent it’ll get passed around for weeks. Put your best storytelling chops to work on this. Try to supplant Wikipedia as the top Google result for your topic. This might not be a single article; it might be a nicely-packaged collection, a wiki, or something else you devise. The key is that it should be long-lasting and distinctive.

2. Give people a starting point online.

You know that excellent explanatory piece you produced four weeks ago as a sidebar to a big news story on your topic? Rescue it from the archives and put it in a nice, prominent place online. Link to it with a clear, compelling headline.

Pull together a page online with links to several such explanatory pieces (from your site and elsewhere), along with good, useful digests of all of them. Make it so that users don’t have to visit every link to get a picture of the story, but have places to go when they want to know more. Set a recurring reminder to check in on this page once a week. Create a shortened URL for this page and repeat it every time you cover this topic.

3. Blog.

Blogging can be one of the simplest, most engaging ways to bring folks along with your process, telling them how you acquired information and asking them for help along the way. Because a blog is a linear format that allows for sub-categories, it can be easier to follow than an archive of news stories, and often all it takes to provide a decent amount of context is a well-formed link.

Let the blog be the DVD commentary to your reporting. Refer to it wherever your stories appear. Make it clear that the blog is the place to go for those who want the inside scoop on how your process works. Then deliver. Make sure it’s written in your voice, not news voice.

Blogging does carry with it the danger that you become even more news-obsessed than you might otherwise be, so keep your eye on the ball (that is, the larger story). Check out my questions for journalists in an age of information overload if you worry about this.

4. Track the unknowns.

Keep a public list of the most important things you don’t know about your topic. Perhaps it’s an outcome or prediction that hasn’t been realized yet, maybe it’s a difficult-to-nail-down statistic, or maybe it’s just something you’re unfamiliar with. If it’s one of the latter two, ask for your community’s help, like Kevin Drum did the other day.

As things come in and out of focus as the issue develops, keep your list updated. Do this in an engaging way. Might I suggest a scorecard?

5. Learn the issue inside and out.

This is actually the most important item on my list. To give your users a sense of the longstanding facts, you have to know them yourself. If there are books available on your topic, read them. Spend a few hours talking with some experts about the subject, to get a genuine understanding of it, not a quote for a story. Try to get your users to ask you questions – whether it’s by hosting live chats, plugging your e-mail address constantly, announcing open threads at regular intervals – and work hard on finding every answer you don’t know.

* * *

This is how I think we can start addressing these issues, but this is barely a beginning. There are a ton of practical questions about how we can shift our news industry towards satisfying our need for context. These are exactly the types of questions Jay Rosen, Tristan Harris and I intend to tackle in our session at SXSW. If you haven’t voted for that session, do it! (Anyone can vote, even if you’re not attending the conference.) I have big plans for what we’ll create for that session if it’s approved. Thanks.

I’ve come to the conclusion that there are four key parts to news stories, and we typically only get one of them, even though journalists possess all four, and the other three are arguably more important.

Note that when I say “news stories,” I mean an ongoing news topic, such as “health reform,” not a particular article. In fact, health reform’s been on my mind a lot recently, so perhaps it’s a good subject to help illustrate what I mean. I’ll start with the part of most news stories we get in spades:

WHAT WE GET: What just happened

Take a look at this Washington Post topic page on health reform. As I write, it includes a list of headlines signaling recent events in the health-care debate: several Democrats called the public plan essential, key senators are pushing cooperatives as an alternative, patients want more transparency on doctors’ links to Pharma, etc.

This stuff is what most news organizations consider the foundation of journalism: the news. To the extent that any of the other parts of a news story get traction, they must fit into a structure where the news is the main attraction.

Of course, this is also the most ephemeral piece of a news story. The reality that these headlines reflect today will likely be completely changed tomorrow. The lead article, about Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats calling the public plan essential, encapsulates an isolated moment of political posturing in a neverending storm of signals sent in press releases, conferences, and interviews, through spokespeople and Twitter accounts, during appearances on Sunday talk shows. By October, this story will lose most of its present meaning.

We often theorize that over time, the accumulated weight of all this news compresses into a sort of understanding, but I remain unconvinced.  At any rate, this might be the worst foundation on which to rest journalism, especially considering that it’s merely a component of the next, more important part:

WHAT WE MISS (1): The longstanding facts

At the scale of news, almost every story looks complicated. Health reform is an impossible-to-follow morass of Congressional committees, policy proposals, industry talking points, and think tank reports. Pull back the lens a bit, however, and you see a fairly straightforward story whose basic contours haven’t changed all that much since 1994.

There is a universe of facts that stay essentially fixed from day to day. Tomorrow, we can be virtually certain that the three basic problems health reform seeks to solve will remain the same as they were last year: effectiveness, cost, and access to care. The same individuals will be heading the same committees they were in the spring. Lobbying groups on different sides of the equation have staked out slightly different positions than they did 15 years ago, but these shifts have been telegraphed over years, and everyone was well-nestled into their respective corners by June. Understanding the forces that combined to defeat health-care reform in 1945 and 1994 will give you a solid vantage point from which to understand the battle in 2009.

The story is much more manageable at this level. Everything that’s changing day-to-day — the news — is the hardest-to-understand component of this picture.

And this is key: To follow the news, you have to grasp this piece. Without this, headlines about “the public option” and “employer pay-or-play” and “MedPAC” are just noise. Having this basic understanding creates the desire for news.

In reality, these longstanding facts provide the true foundation of journalism. But in practice, they play second-fiddle to the news, condensed beyond all meaning into a paragraph halfway down in a news story, tucked away in a remote corner of our news sites. Take a look at that WaPo page again. Currently, a link sits on the far right side of the page, a third of the way down, labeled “What you need to know.” Click on that link, and you’re taken here: a linkless, five-paragraph blog post from May. This basically captures our approach to providing the necessary background to follow the news.

WHAT WE MISS (2): How journalists know what they know

This is a component of every news story that journalists tend not to provide for two reasons: 1) explaining how we get information disrupts our institutional authority and 2) we think it makes stories less interesting.

I think both assumptions are wrongheaded. Understanding how a news story came together is often a vital part of both understanding and enjoying that story.

Once again, let’s use a health reform article as a proxy for this point. On August 5, the New York Times dropped a bomb shell on followers of the health reform debate. The paper reported that the White House had cut a behind-the-scenes deal with PhRMA to prevent Congress from bargaining down drug prices in exchange for $80 billion in savings from the industry. The article that contained these revelations is a whirlwind of posturing — it’s filled with various parties backing away from things or “privately acknowledging” them or floating trial balloons. We know almost nothing about how the reporters got this story. The article feels like a pure flurry of spin. Weeks later, other reporters are still trying to trace back the story of who said what when, and why — the “real story,” in other words, hidden between the lines that appeared in the Times that day.

What undermined the Times’ institutional authority in this case isn’t the revelation of a reporter’s perspective or methods. It’s the perception that the Times is being used as a tool by various interests. The Times’ lack of transparency about its process helps further this perception.

As for the narrative argument, the undisputed most effective piece of journalism on health reform this year was a piece in the New Yorker by Dr. Atul Gawande. Washington Post columnist and health reform wonk Ezra Klein called it “the best article you’ll see this year on American health care.” Kaiser Health News ran an article about its impact, asking a panel of health experts to comment on why it was so powerful. Almost as soon as Gawande’s piece was published, references to it began appearing in President Obama’s speeches. Trust me, it was big.

Read that story, and you might be surprised by how much Gawande focuses on his reporting process. At every turn, Gawande walks you through exactly what he sees, who he’s talked to, and how he comes to his conclusions. In one vignette, he gathers six doctors for dinner, and reproduces highlights of their conversation on the costs of medical care. It’s extraordinarily effective, both as a narrative and as a piece of journalism.

What Gawande did was to structure his search for truth as a quest narrative. Instead of hiding the details about how he comes by his information, he makes that the very focus. Along the way, he makes us apprentices in his quest for truth. We finish the article with a highly refined sense of how Gawande has acquired and verified the information he presents, as well as a framework for further inquiry of our own.

We get a lot more out of this type of reporting, in other words, than the vast majority of news stories, which leave these details out.

WHAT WE MISS (3): The things we don’t know

We often think of journalism as encompassing what we know. But a key part of journalism that usually goes unreported is what we don’t know.

This much is uncontroversial: Every news story is a blend of facts and uncertainties. This should be as uncontroversial, but isn’t: It’s just as important for journalists to enumerate the latter as the former.

This excellent article by Politifact’s Angie Holan takes the rare step of explaining “What we still don’t know.” Beneath that header, Holan lists a few key questions that no journalist covering health reform can answer: Will it have a public option or a variant of it? If so, what will that include? Will it hold down costs over the long term? How will Congress pay for it? Follow the debate over time, and you’ll find that these are the questions that drive our reporting on health reform. Pursuing the answers to these questions is how journalists find the news.

But rarely do we acknowledge what we’re pursuing. When our questions make it into the coverage at all, they have to appear in the mouths of our sources, resulting in paltry, contorted pieces like this one, from the AP.  Or they’re attributed to no one, weaseled into a headline that says only, “[Such-and-such] raises questions.” Whose questions? Not ours, certainly.

When Angie Holan lists the uncertainties around health reform, she’s providing a sort of cliffhanger: Will the Congressional health reform bill include a public option? Stay tuned to find out! Not only does it give us a framework for anticipating (and thereby managing) the information that will come in next, it also stokes our interest in that information.

Changing the model

As long as the news is structured solely around what just happened, journalists are going to be fighting a rough battle. With a latest-news-only approach, we stoke demand for journalism by trying to snag people’s attention with each new development.

There’s another way, one that leads to a more informed and more loyal public, and allows us to do better work. It involves:

• Enlarging the market for journalism by making it easier for more people to understand the longstanding facts behind each story.
• Increasing the appeal of journalism by letting folks in on the details of our quest to uncover the truth.
• Expanding the appetite for journalism by explaining what we don’t know, and what we’re working to find out.

As news consumers, we should be demanding these things as well. After all, right now we’re only getting the lamest part of the story.

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.