Newsless.org

Howard Weaver writes a sweet, short paean to the dailiness of the newspaper:

I’ve been arguing for years that newspapers – yes, printed, daily newspapers – have a good long horizon on the value curve if they shift their focus to the value they already do best: summary, briefings, orientation, authentication. If a printed product did that well, the fact that it’s a once-a-day product would be a strength: a starting point, presumably first thing in the morning, which helped readers orient their day and prepare to parse and interpret all the fact-clotted data that would wash over them ceaselessly for the rest of the day.

I replied by asking why daily was the ideal cycle. “I might be part of a tiny minority in this regard,” I said, “but a weekly local news product would be even more valuable to me than a daily one, so valuable I’d probably even pay for it, if it was good enough.”

Howard’s response to me makes sense. Each of us, of course, has a routine that more-or-less repeats each day. It’s perfectly sensible that this routine should include a news component. And I wholeheartedly agree with him on this point:

I don’t think there’s any either/or here; let a thousand flowers bloom. A weekly compilation of quotidian news (tee hee) might be the best format for it. Other news, we all recognize, needs to be displayed as quickly as possible. A newsless, process-oriented news report should be timeless.

I agree that we should be working towards a news report online that serves the monthly visitor just as well as the hourly one. But cycles still drive how we produce the news. And many local journalists have to wedge their work into one of two cycles — either the rapid rotations that require updates every few minutes, especially favored by news sites in the morning and during the lunch hour, or the daily rotation driven by each day’s newspaper or broadcast.

I still wonder whether some news topics (and consumers) don’t demand different cycles entirely. In Columbia, for example, headlines on municipal matters often crescendo around the City Council meetings that take place on the first and third Mondays of the month. So news on this topic roughly corresponds to a biweekly cycle. And the biweekly publishing schedule of the Columbia Business Times, the local news publication that focuses on these municipal issues, suggests that this pace is well-matched to the topic. We often fret that these municipal stories don’t find much of an audience, but the Business Times is mailed to 6,300 local subscribers, which just about matches the daily circulation of the Columbia Missourian.

I suspect the Business Times audience might also have more of an appetite and expectation for deeper, more contextual stories than the general-interest Missourian audience. The cover story of the most recent issue of the Business Times was a massive series on transportation development districts that actually ran first in the Missourian. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that CBT readers ate that story up, while many Missourian readers skipped it.¹

Sure, topical newspaper sections in most places publish on a less-than-daily schedule. A typical newspaper might feature a Tuesday food section, a Wednesday business section, a Thursday arts-and-entertainment section, etc. These sections might even approximate the production cycle of a weekly more closely than a daily. But by bundling these sections into a daily product, mightn’t we be restricting their appeal to an audience who just wants that information, and doesn’t need it every day?

I gather niche publishing hasn’t been a silver bullet for those news orgs that have wandered into this territory. (Having spent three years as the online editor of a niche publication, I’m familiar with some of the problems.) But I have only the dimmest sense of what’s been tried in this regard. I’d love to see more experiments that paired the depth of a Columbia Tomorrow with the pace of a Columbia Business Times.

1. As you can tell from the “I suspect”s and “I wouldn’t be surprised”s in this paragraph, I don’t think we have much hard data either way, but boy, I’d sure love to see it. [↩]

As panic over the fate of journalism in America reaches a fever pitch, I’m dismayed how much of it continues in this ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ dichotomy that I thought had ended with the ‘who’s a journalist’ wars. I’m still reading criticisms of bloggers who don’t do any original reporting, or reporters whose work doesn’t match their professed standards of objectivity. In my darker moments, I’ll confess to thinking sinister thoughts about cable news personalities who engorge the public with an endless stream of trivia.

As we confront what we’ve lost in the decades-long contraction of the newspaper industry, and as we begin to figure out what we needed but never had, we have to reframe this conversation in purely first-person terms. It’s our society that has to evolve a journalism ecosystem to meet its information needs. It’s a bit of a forehead-slapper to write this, but we’re all in this together, folks.

I thought about this as I read Paul Starr’s excellent report on the decline of the traditional press and Yochai Benkler’s equally excellent rebuttal. Starr’s story is peppered with a panoply of thems; each section invokes the familiar faceless hordes that have long lent authority to news accounts — “some observers,” “many journalists,” “some critics.” That trope has been the downfall of many a news story, given that it’s often used to set up either a straw man or a he-said-she-said moment. The most effective elements of Benkler’s response draw on his tendency to recast those moments with an “I,” “we” or “our.” As in, “I think we do not have good research to know whether this system is also working for local politics and potential corruption as well. This, as Starr shows, is an important area we need to study and understand.” That “we” is universal; it’s any of us. It suggests any citizen might (must!) play a role in understanding this gap.

If a central element of the undoing of the traditional press is unbundling — the diminishing power of jointly packaging advertising and news, the atomization of formerly coherent monopoly news products into info-snippets on blogs and aggregators — a central element of journalism’s renewal will be connection — our ability and responsibility to all play shifting, complementary roles in a potentially vast system of journalism.

Today I’ve seen plenty of variants on a remark about Jon Stewart’s evisceration of Jim Cramer: “Why didn’t a journalist do that?” Answer: Because the role Stewart played is no longer reserved for journalists, if it ever was. Any of us can unleash a devastating act of media criticism, as Stewart did, or re-tweet such an act where and when we find it.

In all the coverage I read about growth and development in Columbia, Mo., the most significant investigative package didn’t come from the Missourian or the Tribune. It was a pair of studies done by citizen activist and university professor Ben Londeree, conducted with all the rigor of an academic. Londeree sought an answer to the question of how much it cost Columbia to hook new developments up to water and sewer connections, roads, and other infrastructure, as compared with the fees the city exacts from developers for their projects. Working with an activist group called the Smart Growth Coalition, he surveyed 40 Midwestern cities (.doc) to get an average of similar costs and fees elsewhere, to see how Columbia stacked up. Then, he compiled a dizzying array of variables specific to Columbia to estimate a figure for the city. And he was transparent about his methodology:

Community websites were studied to obtain as much information as possible about these financing issues. Some websites either didn’t have the information needed for the survey or I was unable to locate it. The most difficult to pin down is the category of exactions for off-site infrastructure because these typically are negotiated at the time of annexation, rezoning, or plan approval.

After the website search, the data were e-mailed to each community’s CEO (mayor or city manager) to verify for accuracy and completeness. A second request was e-mailed to non-responders about four weeks later. Since many still did not reply, telephone calls were made to planning departments and public works departments with excellent cooperation. In several cases, these calls helped to identify additional fees charged by a separate entity such as the county, metropolitan districts, benefit districts, co-ops, and private utilities.

As it happened, Londeree’s studies got quite a bit of local press. The next few years would see the Smart Growth Coalition expand its profile in Columbia city government. Advocates of the coalition’s ideas have now won four out of seven seats on the City Council.

Maybe once upon a time a group of reporters would have beaten Londeree to the punch, or replicated and extended his work to give it that journalistic seal of approval. We’re not in that world anymore. Our society’s welfare will increasingly depend on citizens taking on work that ambitious, as members of non-profits, for-profits, universities, knitting clubs, and every other type of organization out there. And it will depend equally on our ability to evaluate the work not by who did it — not whether it was “us” or “them” — but by how it was done.

Ezra Klein blogged yesterday about what he calls “one of the more frustrating tensions in political journalism,” riffing off this quote from the NYT’s Matt Bai:

Generally speaking, political writers don’t think so much of political scientists, either, mostly because anyone who has ever actually worked in or covered politics can tell you that, whatever else it may be, a science isn’t one of them. Politics is, after all, the business of humans attempting to triumph over their own disorder, insecurity, competitiveness, arrogance, and infidelity; make all the equations you want, but a lot of politics is simply tactile and visual, rather than empirical. My dinnertime conversation with three Iowans may not add up to a reliable portrait of the national consensus, but it’s often more illuminating than the dissertations of academics whose idea of seeing America is a trip to the local Bed, Bath & Beyond.

Klein makes a wonderful point:

Obviously, that doesn’t make much sense. Matt Bai’s conversations with those three Iowans would have gone fairly far towards explaining what those three Iowans thought was driving their vote. But though people don’t tell themselves that they’re tribal creatures who rationalize their attachments and make judgments based on the state of macroeconomic indicators, that explanation fits the data a lot better than anything Bai would have heard over dinner. Indeed, imagine those were Democratic Iowans. In 2004, they would have told Bai that they really believed it important to have a former war hero leading the nation in these times of peril and crisis. In 2008, that wouldn’t have been important to them at all, and instead, they’d have been more interested in a new direction and something called “change.” What people tell you about their vote often tells you a lot more about what they’ve been told about their vote than about why they’re voting the way they are.

But Bai’s piece does lay bare the journalistic tendency to prize “talking to people about stuff” over “learning about stuff.” If I call up Peter Orszag and ask him about the budget outlook, I’m “reporting.” So too if I attend a press conference and listen to other people ask Peter Orszag about the budget outlook. But if I spend a couple hours at my desk reading CBO and OMB documents, I’m not “reporting.” I’m researching. And to get an idea of how the guild distinguishes between the two, note that though a lot of journalists call themselves “reporters,” none call themselves “researchers.”

If this democracy business is going to work out in the long run, all the “us”es of world are going to have to stop sorting people into “them”s and snorting at them. That goes double for journalists.

As this all shakes out, I am confident we will emerge with a corps of individuals who claim journalism as their livelihood. Some small segment will be Sy Hersh-ian muckrakers, rock stars and outliers, stalking through shadowy worlds to singlehandedly expose untold corruptions. But many of them will be Josh Marshalls, for whom investigative journalism could not be done without a thousand engaged citizens each doing a tiny piece of it, and ten thousand more ponying up ten dollars in support of it.

Just as newspapers have lost their monopolies on their audiences, journalists have lost a monopoly on journalism. The responsibility for gathering information and evaluating it has spread throughout the citizenry. We have to figure out how to make that work. All of us. I’m confident we will.

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. [↩]

I’ve been parroting Kevin Kelly’s “1,000 true fans” model so much recently that I forget how many people still haven’t heard it. If you haven’t, take a moment and read the concept. Here’s a taste:

To raise your sales out of the flatline of the long tail you need to connect with your True Fans directly. Another way to state this is, you need to convert a thousand Lesser Fans into a thousand True Fans.

Assume conservatively that your True Fans will each spend one day’s wages per year in support of what you do. That “one-day-wage” is an average, because of course your truest fans will spend a lot more than that. Let’s peg that per diem each True Fan spends at $100 per year. If you have 1,000 fans that sums up to $100,000 per year, which minus some modest expenses, is a living for most folks.

I’m convinced this is one of the best ways to approach the question of business models on the Web. News industry conversations about “the business model” tend to settle somewhere near here: “News-oriented websites have a future … but traffic needs to be above 200 million pageviews per month.”

When you eye the Web through the lens of pageviews and uniques and CPMs, 1,000 of anything seems ridiculously paltry. But if your 1,000 “unique visitors” derive value from the work you create, or if you can find advertisers who value the attention of that community, that might be enough for you to make a living. And if your company comprises a number of individuals, each attending to her 1,000 True Fans, this even starts to look like a business.

And if your 1,000 True Fans are motivated enough by your work to effect change in their communities, this even begins to resemble Journalism.

BTW: This principle dovetails nicely with Caterina Fake’s philosophy that you build a real community by greeting each early user at the door. Among the most essential skills that I believe must be taught to tomorrow’s journalists is community management — a skill entirely lost in today’s discussions about newsroom training. Technical training will be obsolete in a year. But the best community managers on the Web today employ principles refined over a long history of community leadership.

BTW 2: Make sure to read Kelly’s follow-up essay, “The case against 1,000 True Fans,” in which he addresses the practical realities of approaching a business this way. But consider that all of his case studies involve artists, whose work is valued even more abstractly than the work of journalists.

To pick up one of the threads from yesterday’s post, let’s talk about that first question for a minute: “How do we increase the amount or intensity of attention we draw?”

I would argue that right now, news websites are making a play for a very thin slice of our audience’s attention pie. Our primary focus is throwing a ton of headlines against the wall and hoping something sticks. The front page of most news websites is tuned to the world’s shortest attention span; every time someone visits that page, we want them to see something different. Many of us set our home pages to auto-refresh, so if you leave the page open in one of your browser tabs, you’ll see fresh headlines when you click back to it. Once we hook you with one of those headlines, our goal is to keep you clicking as many times as possible before you click away. We try to entice you with links to “similar stories,” “related stories,” “other stories from this section.”

In short, again, we’re focused on capturing merely that fraction of our audience’s attention that seeks to know what’s just happened. In so doing, we mostly ignore the fraction of that attention interested in what led to what just happened, or the fraction that just wants to know what new businesses have opened recently in their neighborhood, etc.

In recent years, we’ve begun to lend some thought to creating what the folks at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution call “durable content” — “information like calendars, guides, sports stats and databases that, with some updating, can be posted and used over long periods.” But I’m proposing that we treat the vast bulk of what we do as “durable content,” and focus our attention on adding to that, not creating ephemera.

Why? Let me draw an analogy:

Sociologists will tell you that the best way to lift all boats in a society is to focus not on income inequality, but on wealth inequality. Income is tenuous; wealth is durable. Wealth (i.e. possessing assets, owning a savings account, etc.) encourages long-term planning, increases the investment of individuals in their society, serves as a hedge against hardship and can be passed on to future generations. Best of all, wealth compounds on itself; it creates more wealth over time. When we encourage people to invest their money, we’re trying to get them to convert their income into wealth.

The news sites of today are obsessed with information income, but they’ve amassed little information wealth. We’re living from information paycheck to information paycheck.¹ I want us to start investing all our information in an archive that  acquires compound value over time.

Wikipedia is an example of an information asset. I’d say Frontline has done a good job of creating an information asset. DavisWiki, a site I’ve mentioned before, is another.

Davis, CA, has two daily newspapers — the Davis Enterprise (since 1897) and UC-Davis’ California Aggie (since 1915). Both newspapers have devoted reporting and production staffs. That is, plenty of information income every single day. DavisWiki is built entirely by volunteer contributors, so it likely has a volatile, mostly undirected stream of information income, but virtually all of that information is invested into the growing archive of the site.

Compete traffic patterns for three sites in Davis, CA

Look at the Compete.com traffic patterns for the three sites.² That blue line is DavisWiki, the Aggie’s in green, and the Enterprise is red. The Enterprise is subscriber-only, and the Aggie makes it difficult to find stories more than a week-old, so neither is quite representative of your typical daily news site. But I think this offers an instructive look at the value of the wiki vs. the value of the two news sites. On the wiki, traffic builds as the site grows over time. The ephemeral news sites are only “worth” what they posted recently.

Also fascinating: Compete points out the two top keywords driving folks to each site. For both newspapers, the keywords are all variants on the newspaper’s name (”davis enterprise, davis enterprise newspaper, california aggie, the california aggie”).³ One of the top queries driving folks to DavisWiki is “cheap movie theaters in Sacramento.”

By making our sites into information assets, we will be going after a much broader slice of attention than we do today. To do this, we have to invest our information properly, not into static articles, which depreciate over time, but into living stories, which increase in value as more information is added or linked. Over time, we’ll grow a long tail of content that accrues attention and (by extension) revenue⁴ even while it’s mostly untouched and unpromoted.

1. I may have carried this analogy too far, and for that, I’m truly sorry. [↩]
2. Yes, Compete’s traffic metrics are totally off, but the relative figures are informative. [↩]
3. Search as navigation. News site publishers recognize that. [↩]
4. That’s how this relates to the business model. [↩]