Newsless.org

For the longest time, whenever I read the news, I’ve often felt the depressing sensation of lacking the background I need to understand the stories that seem truly important. Day after day would bring front pages with headlines trumpeting new developments out of city hall, and day after day I’d fruitlessly comb through the stories for an explanation of their relevance, history or import. Nut grafs seemed to provide only enough information for me to realize the story was out of my depth.

I came to think of following the news as requiring a decoder ring, attainable only through years of reading news stories and looking for patterns, accumulating knowledge like so many cereal box tops I could someday cash in for the prize of basic understanding. Meanwhile, though, with the advancements of the Web and cable news, the pace of new headlines was accelerating—from daily to minute-by-minute—and I had no idea how I’d ever begin to catch up.

In 2008, I encountered a study describing others from my generation who seemed to share my dilemma. The Associated Press had commissioned professional anthropologists to track and analyze the behavior of a group of young media consumers. Their key conclusion: “The subjects were overloaded with facts and updates and were having trouble moving more deeply into the background and resolution of news stories.”

The study’s participants seemed to respond to this ever-deepening ocean of news much like I had. We would shy away from stories that seemed to require a years-long familiarity with the news and incline instead toward ephemeral stories that didn’t take much background to understand—crime news, sports updates, celebrity gossip. This approach gave us plenty to talk about with friends, but I sensed it left us deprived of a broader understanding of a range of important issues that affect us without our knowing.

Read the rest at Nieman Reports.

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.

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 »

OK. I’m taking a break from stock-piling dollar bills beneath my mattress to utter really the only trenchant observations I can summon amidst all this.

First, having been obsessively reloading a number of news sources for most of the day, the most cogent reaction I’ve read so far has been this, from the Columbia Journalism Review:

The crisis presents a moment for reflection. For the business press, there are only two options when considering what has happened here, neither particularly good. Either the business press institutionally provided appropriate arms-length scrutiny of the financial-services industry, including investigative work, opinion, analysis and rigorous beat reporting that provided decision-makers, including readers, with fair warnings of the coming collapse, and it was ignored, or it didn’t do the work in the first place. We know that the answer is some combination of the two. But, if we accept the foregoing logic, then best case for the business media is that what it writes doesn’t matter, in which case, why bother?

Clearly this crisis is not all about the press, but the press is critically implicated, as it was after Enron. Part of that failure is now in the past, and unrecoverable — the revelation that Wall Street was a fraud came too late to avert the evaporation of hundreds of billions of dollars; while the stage was being set for one of the biggest stories of our lives, the press seems to have been asleep on the job. But part of the failure is ongoing.

Clay Aiken vs. the bailout on Google Trends

We suffer from a giant, collective understanding gap about the crisis and the proposed solutions. Polls suggest citizens are missing key facts about the bailout, and that this disparity of information may be the single biggest factor in the bill’s reception among the public. Yet there’s clearly a hunger for information; the recently outed Clay Aiken took a back seat to the bailout on Google Trends this past week. Of course, the biggest question — what on earth is going to happen now? — is unknowable. But there’s a lot we do know …

• At a high level, what led to the current crisis?
• What are some historical analogues to the crisis?
• What, in plain English, did the amended bailout plan propose to do?
• What did economists and others cite as the merits and demerits of such a plan?
• What alternatives have been attracted serious economist attention, and what are their pros and cons?
• What’s the worst-case scenario?

Yet journalists are still failing to deliver this information accessibly. All of it is scattered across hundreds of news sites, government reports, blog posts, &c. And even in the places it appears, all of this contextual information is being buried by the avalanche of breaking news on the topic, much of which plays up the overheated soap opera on the Hill, little of which adds to an understanding of the factors at work and how they might affect us.

Among the best comprehensive coverage I’ve seen are a reasonably robust article sidebar from the BBC, the NYT topic page on the bailout plan, and a nice summary page from the Financial Times. But each of these requires the reader to do a massive amount of work to start answering some of the basic questions above. They haven’t packaged this information together or even linked it up in an accessible manner for someone looking for decent background on the issue. Instead, they offer a hodgepodge of headlines, most of which relate to unfolding news events.

The single most straightforward source providing a readable background of the issue as well as broken-out sections on all the elements I alluded to (components of the bailout, possible effects, alternatives, reactions)? I probably don’t need to tell you.

How is it possible that no one in the news industry has created a comprehensive-yet-approachable site to deliver the context necessary to grasp this crisis? It wouldn’t take much. A Web designer with a flair for the minimalistic. One or two business reporters who can translate economese. Several stark, straightforward subject headings — History, Ideas, Politics, What’s Ahead — that sort of thing. A link-path to guide the lazy and uninitiated from beginning to end. And a great editor to keep it all concise, eloquent and accurate.

Executed well, it would be such a tremendous service. I imagine it would garner a significant audience, and it might prove to be the hub for a more productive, less fragmented discussion than has occurred so far. It would be a step towards redemption for whatever failures contributed to this moment.

The books, the Frontline episodes, the newspaper series and all the other Pulitzer bait will come eventually. But probably too late to offer understanding that could make a difference now.

Update: Howard Owens has a good post castigating the Patriot-Act-ish deference the press has given the administration and Wall Street in the wake of all this. He ends up converging with some of the same points I make above. For both his post and mine, standard caveats apply — it’s incredibly easy to throw stones at the press; plenty of excellent reportage has been done; Dean Starkman made an excellent tenth point (“Journalism is something but it isn’t everything”). But I still think there’s a lot of valid and valuable criticism here.

Jay Rosen’s been on something of a tear recently over the notion that news sites should be paying much more attention to the explanatory function behind their journalism. After having been somewhat indifferent to stories about the subprime crisis and its effects on the lending industry, Jay heard the “Giant Pool of Money” episode of This American Life. The episode gave him an entertaining yet comprehensive understanding of the crisis, and he found himself seeking out more news on the topic.

By explaining the background of the story to Jay, TAL had made him a consumer for more information about the story. Jay’s conclusion:

If the providers of information aren’t providing the basic explainers that turn people into customers for that information, they don’t deserve those customers and won’t retain them. If explanation is required for information acquisition, then the explainer comes “before” the informer as a pre-requisite. We typically have it the other way around.

So as we think about new models for news we need to think about expanding that little what’s this? feature you sometimes see on effective web sites. That’s not about web design. That’s a whole category in journalism that I fear we do not understand at all.

This conclusion is central to my research. I think there’s a giant realm of news stories our audiences don’t understand enough to be interested in them. To an extent, of course, that’ll always be true. But rather than continuously attempt to enlarge the audience for a given story, we pitch our stories only to the fraction of our audience that already understands the context.

What if we make it easy for our audience to get quickly up to speed on any topic? (And by “easy,” I don’t just mean a collection of our headlines on a given story. I’m talking more this speed.) Could we expand the audience for more of our coverage?

I suspect we could.