Newsless.org

My research proposal was called “Wikipedia-ing the News.” I’ve spent many posts chronicling the wonders of Wikipedia. Yet, as I’ve mentioned, the news site I’m creating to illustrate the arguments I’ve been advancing here will not be a wiki.¹ Why am I such a hypocrite?

I decided early on that given the time and resource constraints on my fellowship project, I would have to keep the site’s scope tight. As a result, there are tons of components of journalism’s evolution that this project will not significantly touch on — things like business models, social networking, and the world of mobile.

One of the things we heard loud and clear from the folks who led local wiki projects was that wikis are like gardens. They require a sustained investment of time and energy up front to make them truly valuable over the long term. Once the wiki is live, the community has to be nurtured, and goals and expectations must be set before the value of public editing starts to become plain. According to Mike Ivanov, one of creators of DavisWiki, he and the site’s other founding contributors spent months seeding the wiki with hundreds of articles on Davis before opening the site up to the public. I realized early that we probably wouldn’t have enough time to put in the investment to make the wiki worth it.

A lesser consideration in my decision to forgo the wiki was the feature set of available software. Playing around with open-source wiki packages such as MediaWiki and Expression Engine, I found that support for multimedia wasn’t the best out of the box. (The subject we’re covering — growth and development in Columbia, MO — will require a fair amount of multimedia to present effectively.) I also had some worries about how much flexibility the software would give us with the site design.

Finally, one of the things I most hope to demonstrate is that there’s nothing magical about a particular piece of software that enables the principles of journalism I’m arguing for. Focusing on delivering context doesn’t require a wiki, it requires a shift in purpose.

All that said, if this were an open-ended project, I absolutely would have made it a wiki. With enough time, we would have figured out design and multimedia. And if we succeeded in convening a community invested in the site, public contributions could be invaluable. I had a brief love affair with a little software package called Bitweaver, before deciding against using it in production. I’m tremendously intrigued about the possibilities for projects such as Semantic MediaWiki. Wiki software is only going to get more robust and interesting in the years to come. It’s awesome to see news organizations such as the Washington Post and Jacksonville.com experimenting with it. I’m sure one of my departing recommendations to the Missourian when I complete this fellowship will be to investigate transitioning the site to a wiki over the long term.

1. In case you’re wondering, I’ve decided to use Wordpress. [↩]

Wondering what happened to your Newsless RSS feed? It’s not just you. Migrating the feed from Feedburner to Google has caused all sorts of headaches for customers across the Web. The good news is I think most of my problems with the Newsless feed are fixed. Wherever you subscribe, it should be working again. Let me know if you’re still having troubles.

Also, if you pulled up Newsless last Wednesday, you might have seen a long string of short posts in Japanese. I’m still not sure exactly what happened, but I’m keeping an eye on it. Sorry about that, and thanks for following.

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. [↩]

It sounds jargon-y, but there aren’t too many ways to make this pop. If you haven’t noticed, I’m all about the systematic accumulation of knowledge. I think it’s something the Web does really, really well.

Of course, my research project concerns knowledge accumulation. But as I’ve been saying more and more recently, I also want us to get much more systematic about compiling information on how to evolve journalism. And a growing chorus of voices seem to be converging on this point.

For example: after coming to Mizzou in December, David Westphal put out a call for information to create a database of independent news sites. (He started creating that database in October, profiling a number of independent news start-ups in a week-long series.) When it’s live, if it’s well taken-care-of, this database will become a spectacular resource.

I posted another example recently, Chris Amico’s stellar compendium of tools for news.

Can we also start compiling different approaches to funding, from micro-patronage to flyerboards to ad auction networks, along with some information about how different approaches are working?

Earlier, I mentioned that I was searching for great questions. We definitely need more of those, as Mark Hamilton argues in a post today. And these projects demonstrate how I’d like to see those questions answered — systematically, transparently, comprehensively and collaboratively. And this probably isn’t the last you’ll hear from me on this.

I just finished giving a talk about my research for the local chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. Here’s the talk:

Free video streaming by Ustream

And here’s the slideshow, if you’d like to follow along:

Since I’m all about transparency, my notes for the talk are after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

This isn’t really about context or journalism. I spent a couple hours after Obama’s victory speech grabbing full screenshots of a bunch of websites. My little piece of history.

The past week has been a hectic one, between being a good host, polishing off a News Challenge grant application, attending a daylong symposium on CMSes led by these folks, feverishly refreshing my “election ‘08 rock stars” folder in Google Reader, and spending much of yesterday brainstorming about news site structure with my fellow Fellow Jane Stevens.

More consensus, by way of Newsmaven and Journerdism:

• Paul Gillin’s on board: “In the old days, publishing was the end of a process; today, it’s the beginning. Once a story is published, it’s subject to enhancement, analysis, commentary and updates. Journalists need to be ready for the likelihood that they may be called upon to revise and develop a story long after it’s been published. It’s the Wikipedia model gone mainstream. Stories never die as long as there’s some who’s still interested in them.”
• Google’s Marissa Mayer is on board: She echoes what Google senior adviser Richard Gingras had said about the article becoming the atomic unit of news consumption. My quibbles with that contention persist.

The Christian Science Monitor, now in training to become a newsmagazine, sounds like it’s not fully on board yet, but it’s beginning the pre-boarding process:

[CSM editor John] Yemma said he sees planning some of the pieces for the weekly in a way that helps create topics pages for the Web site. For instance, the prototype of the new magazine has a cover story called the “Putin Generation.” That piece would eventually slide onto the topics page of CSMonitor.com for Russia.

“In a sense, the magazine helps us kind of create, over time, a sort of Monitor encyclopedia of the world that will be a living encyclopedia,” he said. “The web is about relatively short, relatively fast updates. The magazine is more in-depth and the two work together on the Web.”

Happy Halloween, Newsless readers. I’ll be dressing up as Jeremiah Wright tonight.

Got a fun email this morning, pointing out that nowhere in my research proposal do I mention “readers,” “ethics,” or “integrity.” All true.

Search this blog, and you’ll discover that I tend to eschew “readers” in favor of words like “community,” “users” and (occasionally) “audience,” words that I hope convey a slightly different or more intense form of engagement. This murkiness of language might reflect the fact that the notion of the “audience” is suffering from a mild 1991 problem of its own.

And while both “ethics” and “integrity” are under-used here, I do try to emphasize “values” and “standards.” More on that in a moment.

You can’t tell from my blogging, but I’ve gotten rather sensitive about the word “Wikipedia.”

Earlier this year, after I’d written my research proposal, I was casting about for a title to communicate the core concept I hoped to pursue. I recalled a whitepaper by Shayne Bowman, Ellen Kampinsky and Chris Willis called “Amazon-ing the News,” which I thought snappily conveyed what they were about. Just before sending it off to the folks at Reynolds, I slapped on the title “Wikipedia-ing the News,” with a little note-to-self to think of something better.

So now, every time my project gets introduced, the word “Wikipedia” is thrust into an expectant void, and opinions are formed before I say the first word about my research. Thus, as I mentioned, I’m a teensy bit sensitive. But it’s probably time to confront the W-bomb head-on.

When I mention Wikipedia, my listener’s full attention turns automatically to the “wiki” part. It’s editable by anyone. All of the tricky issues inherent in the public, anonymous provenance of the site’s information come rushing to mind before we even get to the “pedia” suffix. But that suffix is where my fascinations — and my research questions — begin.

Let’s get the wikinoia out of the way. The news site I’m theorizing will be completely agnostic as to who creates the content. You could make a version of this news site where all content comes from (1) a newsroom of professional reporters and editors, (2) a nebulous and voluntary set of “citizens from the community,” (3) a hybrid of professional journalists and community contributors (more on that much later), or (4) Maureen Dowd. I don’t care. (OK, except for 4, which would be a travesty. I do not in any way authorize the use of my ideas to further MoDo’s influence on the world.)

As I mentioned in my last post, “encyclopedia” is too small and ancient a word to describe Wikipedia. The site has no predecessor for how it organizes archival and contextual information while accommodating breaking news, how it shepherds dozens of competing voices towards consensus, how it manages to make information more valuable over time rather than less, how it incorporates communities, how it became t_{he most search-engine-optimized site on the Web} …

The site has no predecessor, period. There’s a ton for news sites to learn from it. And there are many questions to address for how to translate what we learn to a journalism context. It’s not the only inspiration or example I’ll draw on for this project, but it’s a big one.

Or: The 1991 problem

As I sort-of argue in my research proposal, Wikipedia isn’t an encyclopedia, but that’s the best word we’ve got. (Actually I called it a “useful shorthand,” but I meant that to be backhanded.) Given its unbound, dynamic, hyperlinked nature, we just don’t have the vocabulary to really describe what Wikipedia is, so we use the word encyclopedia as a familiar point of reference.

Call it the 1991 Problem. We’re still stuck with the language of 1991 while discussing the technologies of 2008.

Imagine yourself trying to describe an iPhone to an average Joe from 1991. By calling it a phone, you instantly constrain the fellow’s sense of what you’re describing. “Well, yes, it’s a telephone. But it doesn’t have any wires and you can use it from anywhere. Also, the whole thing is a computer that you operate by touching the screen. And it’s sort of a hyper-charged Walkman, too. Oh, and it can tell you where you are on a map, and which of your friends are nearby, and where the nearest pizza place is. And don’t get me started on visual voicemail …”

The iPhone is to the telephone what Wikipedia is to the encyclopedia.

en · cy · clo · pe · di · a [en-sahy-kluh-pee-dee-uh] – noun – 1) a book or set of books containing articles on various topics, usually in alphabetical arrangement, covering all branches of knowledge or, less commonly, all aspects of one subject.

When we say “encyclopedia,” that’s (^) what’s running through the head of Joe from 1991. Wikipedia encompasses a compendium of fantastically diverse pages, some of which are merely collections of links to other pages, each of which features a thoughtful conversation about the material included or excluded from the page. It’s a set of procedures for organizing vast and diverse subsets of information. It’s a sizeable and devoted community. It’s a Web application. “Encyclopedia” doesn’t even begin to cover it.

I want there to be a 1991 problem for news. I want to make a news site so novel and amazing Joe wouldn’t even know what hit him.