Newsless.org

Synthesis: “The combining of the constituent elements of separate material or abstract entities into a single or unified entity.”
Aggregation: “A group or mass of distinct or varied things, persons, etc. Collection into an unorganized whole.”

We’ve spent many long years urging news sites to do more aggregation. Battle won. The new motto should be: “Don’t just aggregate, synthesize.”

Earlier this year, I posted that I wanted to see more focused discussions about journalism’s future:

If what we want to ask is “How can we save serious, detailed, local investigative journalism?” then I suspect we can have a more focused and productive conversation if we actually asked that question. Ditto if the question is “How can we make sure the local school board meeting is covered?” When folks rightly say that there’s not going to be a one-size-fits-all answer to the problems plaguing journalism, it’s because we lack even a one-size-fits-all question. “How do we save The Newspaper?” certainly isn’t it.

I’ve been hearing fewer how-do-we-save-the-newspaper-ish questions recently, but I’m still picking up conversations like, “What’s the business model for journalism?” So I figure that instead of railing against the questions I’m not impressed by, I’ll volunteer some questions that do nag at me.

I’m interested in being somewhat methodical about this. Again, journalism isn’t science. But an effort to quantify what we might be missing (or in danger of missing) could help us focus our efforts to provide it.

What are the most valuable functions currently performed by news organizations that are imperiled by the transition to digital?

We shall bicker about the “most valuable” component of this question, but I think a little bickering now-and-then is good. More on that in a second. Meanwhile, I’m especially keen on a focus on functions, rather than institutions or processes.

How might we measure the value of these functions?

I’m very curious about this. It seems distastefully clinical, but nonetheless really intriguing. Have there been efforts to measure the value of different journalistic functions? We know a free press correlates strongly with lower corruption. Do we know whether more journalists equals less corruption? If so, is there a sort of margin of diminishing results beyond which the number of journalists per capita doesn’t matter? Does journalism training affect the equation? Is publicly-funded journalism as effective at suppressing corruption as privately-funded journalism?

Outside of corruption, are there other measurable advantages of journalism? What effect do crime reporters have on crime? Does art criticism beget better art? Without the business press, would the meltdown have been worse?

If we could begin to quantify the value journalism provides, I think we could more effectively support it. The current prevailing argument — “Without news organization X, you wouldn’t have had investigation Y” — is acquiring the flavor of Senator McCain’s POW story circa September. If we could make the case that crime coverage tends to suppress crime, we’ve got a great marketing pitch for a community to come together and find some way to support a crime reporter.

What functions have been neglected by news organizations that we should account for in this transition?

I think we digital triumphalists have done a pretty good job of pointing out many of these. Someone should start cataloguing the sorts of brand-new functions tomorrow’s journalism is already starting to perform: like creating a place for communities to coalesce around the news and helping communities organize in the midst of a crisis.

What models of support might map well to each of these functions?

If we’re serious about building a sustainable journalistic infrastructure, I think this question will get us further than almost any other. We have plenty of evidence that different journalistic functions will map better to particular support models. Investigative journalism is already beginning to incline towards a non-profit, philanthropic model. Education reporting might be given to an advertising model of some kind. If we can begin to catalogue different models functioning effectively in different situations, we might be able to answer questions like, “What options should a health industry reporter in Minneapolis pursue to acquire support?”

How should these functions evolve to meet the opportunities afforded by digital media?

Plenty of experimentation on this front is already occurring, of course. As more beats start moving online in force, I cannot wait to see what results. Crime journalism saw the beginnings of a revolution with the dawn of ChicagoCrime.org. Talking Points Memo broke new ground in investigative journalism. Which niches remain untransformed? How do we transform them?

Update: Will tweets along a couple of questions: “Is what journalists value the same thing as what ‘readers’ value?” “How can we monetize it online without it sucking, or whats the next Craigslist?”

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.

OK, this post is a little off-the-beaten-path of my main argument, but it’s somewhat relevant. Over the past several years, parallel trends led the evolution of Web design and Web development, and I wonder if there’s a parable in here for journalism.

If you were a Web designer in 2000, the ultimate product of your work was typically an HTML document. Unfortunately, HTML wasn’t built to handle design, so sophisticated looks were only possible with a fairly cumbersome amount of hackery. Imagine trying to lay out a Web page in Excel. (I’m really not exaggerating.) Designers had to slice up images to fit precisely into a matrix of table cells. Every element on the page — each headline, each paragraph, each image — was wrapped in code specifying where it should go and what it should look like. Changing the look of a bunch of Web pages meant wading into each and every page and carefully altering the code.

Right around that time, some forward-thinking designers began a push to separate the design of a Web page from its content. With the popular adoption of CSS, designers were freed from spreadsheet layouts, and they could set flexible but universal rules for how page elements should be displayed. They could easily set paragraphs in the body of an article to look one way and paragraphs in the article’s sidebar to look another. And best of all, this could all be done in a single stylesheet document which was completely separate from any content. Altering the look of all your pages meant simply altering a rule in the stylesheet.

Meanwhile, a Web developer in 2000 was probably using the coding language PHP. The defining advantage of this language was that its code could be deposited right into an HTML document, allowing developers to write mini-applications in the middle of a Web page … instant gratification. And many did. But it often had the consequence of tying code and content together, which got messy real quick. This and other aspects of the language did little to encourage coding discipline, and Web applications from the era were often slapdash concoctions that scaled poorly and inhibited collaboration.

In recent years, developers have followed designers en masse in seeking to isolate the different elements of a Web application. The database schema was neatly defined in one realm, the functions that interacted with the database were segregated in another, and the templates that called those functions had their own place as well. Although the same developers often still work in all three realms, they’re increasingly turning to frameworks like Django and Ruby on Rails to help enforce that separation of tasks.

Your typical act of journalism today comprises at least three fairly discrete functions. We first (1) gather, then (2) filter, and finally (3) present information. Might we be able to build a case for giving each of those functions its due?

What if each news site had a repository where we attempt to publicly store most of the data we collect — interview recordings/transcripts, FOIA-ed documents, databases, raw video, etc.? And what if we also provided a sandbox where our users could annotate those transcripts, highlight documents, point out patterns in the data? And then finally, give them a platform on which to present their findings, encouraging them to tell creative and engaging stories?

Of course, the stuff of our trade — truth and information — is messier than code and even design. I doubt journalism will ever be orderly, and some of the best stuff is the product of no discernible process or discipline. But I think there are respects in which our tendency to see the act of journalism as a sort of undifferentiated muddle might hamper our creativity about what journalism can be.