Newsless.org

Ken Burns spoke at the Star Tribune in 2007, just before the premiere of his documentary, The War. Although he didn’t say it explicitly, a surprising detail became clear during his presentation: what motivated him most in the creation of The War wasn’t the film itself, but the footage. Every day, he said, another wave of World War II veterans was passing on, each person a library¹ of insight on a drama that will reverberate long after all of us are gone, just after many of them had found their voice. When critics complained about the doc’s lengthy running time, they were missing the point. Burns’ edits, while careful, were an afterthought. The value had been in capturing the voices, not distilling them.

It might be maudlin, but I think about this as cities everywhere shed their longtime reporters. As I suggested early in the life of this blog, I think a news organization’s most valuable asset is the tremendous intellectual capital in its newsroom, the decades of knowledge about how the city works at a fundamental level. The past few years have seen a drastic depletion of this precious asset.

Thankfully, though, most of these reporters are still with us. And therein lies an opportunity.

Last fall, CJR ran a series of observations from departing journalists called “Parting Thoughts.” The essays were wistful, nostalgic, amusing, cathartic, sometimes angry, occasionally optimistic. It was a good idea, and I wonder if we could extend it.

I’d be tremendously curious to hear from these departing journalists a birds-eye-view of their beat. What were the most important developments they covered that even those readers who weren’t paying attention should be aware of? What from their beat should their community be keeping an eye on in the near future? What processes had they developed for covering the beat? Which stories had they always planned to do but never got around to? What advice would they give to anyone who wanted to pick up where they left off?

Unshackled from the need to be viewed as opinionless arbiters, ex-reporters might be able to give a more honest, probing, far-reaching assessment of their beats than they could while they were on the job. A collection of these interviews for every city would be a marvelous trove of knowledge, the beginnings of a stellar information asset. The interviews could be conducted by anyone — local bloggers, the reporter’s former colleagues, rival news orgs, Facebook friends.

Is this happening anywhere? If not, can someone try it?

If I get the time, I might just call up a few of my former colleagues myself.

1. His word. [↩]

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 »

For me, the central miracle of the metropolitan daily newspaper is this: every single day, the organization sends hundreds of people into the city to perform the task of gathering and distilling information about that city. I just find that remarkable. These agents collect a mind-boggling amount of information, a fraction of which makes its way into the paper on any given day.

Indulge me for a moment in a semi-metaphorical interpretation of our publishing process.

[geek]

To make a newspaper, editors apply a massive set of filters to that mountain of information each day. First they ask, “What do we know today that we didn’t know yesterday?” That weeds out all but a thin stream of info. They then sort the resulting subset of information in descending order of importance and interestingness. (The importance/interestingness variable - what we call “news judgment” - is the trickiest factor in the equation.) They compile the items from the top of that sort into the next day’s front page, and then perform two cascading sorts: first by topic, then by importance and interestingness. The result is what gets dropped onto your driveway each morning.

We’re told daily that information is now cheaper than air. In this respect, newspapers have been way ahead of the curve, because they have been discarding heaps of information daily for decades. Because the very first filter we apply to our information (”what do we know today that we didn’t know yesterday?”) places a premium on recency over everything else (topic, importance, interestingness), even the information we publish is encoded into a format (the “article”) that degrades almost instantly in value.

I argue that we should evolve this process in a few key ways:

• Make much more of our information available. We’ve started this process, by creating blogs and other spaces online where we can publish stories that don’t fit into the print newshole. We need to expand the process. Make sure the observations jotted into reporters’ notebooks make it into beat-specific blogs. And for goodness’ sake, open the archives.
• Encode that information in formats with more longevity. A Wikipedia article is an excellent example of a format that holds information well over time. Database visualizations are another excellent example.
• Make more and different filters available to our audience (or to editors) to process the information. The “what do we know today that we didn’t know yesterday” filter is great, but I’d love to have access to that importance filter, unconstricted by any time frame.

One way of looking at the journalism industry is that it makes information valuable by applying sophisticated filters to it. We have the capacity to do much more of that.

[/geek]

Just kidding. I am never really going to close the geek tag.

I just sat in on a budget meeting/class at the Columbia Missourian, where the topic du jour was city planning and zoning. City editor Scott Swafford gave a wonderfully informative 30-minute spiel on the basics of Columbia zoning.

More than almost anything else, zoning determines a place’s character - what its neighborhoods will feel like, how vibrant its downtown will be. Many of the most arresting local stories originate on this beat, as residents’ notions of what their city can become clash and fuse with each other.

But many zoning stories also dull readers with droning accounts of arcane city planning processes, byzantine rules and obscure details. Scott distilled some of those rules and processes down to a perfectly digestible essence in his 30-minute lecture, explaining, for example, what it means for a parcel of land to be designated “C-3″ (general business district). He also walked through the evolution of the principles that now govern zoning in the city of Columbia, giving us a useful backgrounder on the current hot topics and what they mean for the future of the place.

I couldn’t help but think that most residents of the city probably don’t know this information, but would find it fascinating. That’s the type of information reporters and editors often possess in spades, but it appears in their work only in sporadic trickles. If we could easily deliver this sort of background to our audiences, I think we could create a market for more information on this topic, and rescue our zoning stories from the page B4 backwater where they currently fester.

In the coming days, I’ll write more about the information surplus that news organizations enjoy (but don’t employ).

Update: Here’s my post on the info surplus.