Newsless.org

One of my favorite insights embedded in Vin Crosbie’s excellent essay on the state of the US newspaper industry:

[Newspaper editors] came to believe that producing a common edition for everyone is their raison d’être, forgetting it arose as a limitation of their technology. Fitting psychologist Abraham Maslow’s statement that “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail,” the editorial production limitation of Gutenberg’s technology has led most newspaper editors to believe that they set the ‘common agenda’ for their community and likewise that their community’s readership is somehow homogenous because it reads the same newspaper edition on any given day.

It’s amazing that you still hear this canard so often in the annals of journalism. We’ve come to view the newspaper’s inability to break out of a one-size-fits-all general-interest format as a feature, not a bug. Vin provides a delicious example to illustrate the point: “The top headline on the front page of a 120,000 circulation daily published Monday was ‘Builder Gets OK for Road Change’ about an access road bordering one of dozens of shopping plazas in a New York State suburban county with 160 miles of public roads and nearly one million residents.”

Given such an example, I’d give it five minutes before Old School Journalist X is ranting about how expanded choice in media allows us to retreat into our respective ideological corners. Ten minutes max till he pulls out Bowling Alone.

I’m certainly not going to argue there’s nothing of value in the idea of a news commons. I’m as frightened as the next guy of the prospect of someone getting all her news filtered through FreeRepublic. I also don’t believe in the news commons as an inviolable democratic principle passed down to us by George Jesus Washington Christ himself, however. And there’s a very strong critique to be made of the notion that there should be a few authoritative information oracles consulted by all.

But all these arguments are quickly becoming moot. The news commons is dying a little more each day. The question before us is what we will replace it with. Which brings me to a thought-provoking paper by Mark Deuze published this summer in the International Journal of Communication, entitled “The Changing Context of News Work: Liquid Journalism and Monitorial Citizenship.”

If you’re looking for a neat treatise on how to evolve journalism for the 21st Century, look elsewhere, as Deuze himself concedes somewhere around page 13. But if you’re interested in a successor to the news commons, Deuze begins to posit a replacement:

If the old model of journalism was to push news to the masses so they could vote informed in representative democracy, the argument as outlined in this essay begs the question of how the new media ecology contributes to a new or renewed form of citizenship, and what the role of journalism in such a context would be. Whether or not one is optimistic or hopeful about the collective intelligence found online and the networked individualism offline, it seems doubtful that it is possible to call upon citizens to embrace some sense of socially cohesive purpose that is based on their social identity as centrally informed members of a mass audience: an audience of voters for politics, and an audience of consumers for journalism.

Instead of focusing on voter apathy, one could argue that democracy has arrived at its most successful stage yet: a phase where people trust or believe the political system will function regardless whether they engage with it or not. [Emphasis mine.] If democracy effectively means outsourcing governance to a political elite, it has succeeded. However, this is not exactly what is happening. Rather than voter disinterest or civic disengagement, we see another, more anti-hierarchical and deeply individualized type of citizenship emerging. This is the attitude of the citizen-consumer.

Just today, I gave a talk in which I mentioned that our information landscape had changed drastically, and so the role of journalism has to change. Typically, I throw a line in there about how media literacy is becoming much more important, and how we need to empower citizens with better tools for telling stories and evaluating information. But the changing role of a citizen in a democracy is even more fundamental. We should consider this central to the question of a successor to the news commons.

Before I get too carried away, I should let you guys in on what I’ll be exploring during my year at the Reynolds Institute, so you can grok my frame of mind. This is my proposal as written, sent to the good folks at Reynolds on 2/28/08.

Wikipedia-ing the News¹

Five years ago, blogger Dave Winer and New York Times executive Martin Nisenholtz made a bet. “In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 02007,” Winer wagered, “weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times Web site.”

When it came time to judge the bet, blogs outranked the Times on four out of the five chosen stories, making Winer the winner. But the real news out of the bet was the site that trounced them both — Wikipedia.

In all that’s been written about Wikipedia, we tend to hear an emphasis on the same few details — the stupefying economics of its army of unpaid volunteers; the amazing order that has arisen out of its chaotic, ad hoc editing processes; hand-wringing over whether the resource is essentially trustworthy or not. But what fascinates me most about the site is its innovative, Web-native structure. “Encyclopedia” is a useful shorthand for describing what Wikipedia aims to do, but that label fails to capture the full reality of what Wikipedia can do. As the New York Times noted last year, the Web site works astonishingly well as a hub for news. In fact, I think it points the way forward for what our news sites should become, and that is what I propose to explore and prototype in a fellowship at the Reynolds Institute.

The online news sites of today remain hobbled by a framework inherited from their forbears. Almost every news site, whether affiliated with a radio outlet, a television station, a newspaper, or none of these, is structured around this one context — the most recent mix of interesting stories selected by editors. Yet users, especially those of geographically focused news sites, approach these sites with a dizzying variety of contexts in mind. What’s happening to my neighborhood? Who won last night’s game? How do I identify and contact my congressional representatives? What’s traffic like on the way to work? Who should I call to fix my faucet? In many of today’s online newsrooms, copious energy is expended addressing each of these contexts, usually one by one in near isolation.

I’m not the only one thinking along these lines. The American Press Institute’s February 2008 report “Making the Leap Beyond ‘Newspaper Companies’” posits the creation of a “localpedia” modeled after Wikipedia. And from my vantage point having worked in online newsrooms and spoken with leaders across the industry at conferences, I have a strong hunch that this idea is the embodiment of what we ultimately hope to create. But in newspapers, at least, we have been working backwards, slowly trying to extend our context of “daily news” into a context that is both timelier and more timeless.

To paint a broad picture: Imagine if the work of the hundreds of reporters dispatched daily to cover a city didn’t merely fade into an obscure archive, but added day after day to the work that came before it. An online news site in the era of Wikipedia would be a living archive, adaptable to suit any context, growing to encompass all aspects of life in a community. Entries would be deeply and meaningfully interlinked to other entries, elegantly situating every news event in multiple larger contexts. The “latest news” on the site could be a kind of changelog, reflecting new additions or edits in the system. The site would be a news commons atop which other narrative presentations of the news — stories, blogs, videos, games — could sit.

In a year at the Reynolds Institute, I would work to fill in the details of this sketch and explore several pathways for how we could get from here to there. This vision of the news presents much to investigate. Among the avenues of inquiry I would likely pursue in a fellowship:

• Workflow and organization: At the Star Tribune, I was the leader of a project to develop an internal taxonomy to categorize all the organization’s content and advertising. So I have a head start in thinking about how I would organize and populate a site that aimed to be the comprehensive information source for a region.
• Presentation: One of the deliverables I would intend to create as part of this fellowship is a prototype of the news site in action, ideally in partnership with students or faculty from the university’s visual journalism program. I’d also explore how such a site could adapt to the increasingly distributed nature of the Web, where information exists not only in Web browsers, but also in RSS readers, mobile phones, “widgets” embedded in other Web sites, and elsewhere.
• Social experience and user interaction: The largest project I have helmed during my time at the Star Tribune has been the creation of the award-winning arts-and-entertainment website Vita.mn, which boasts a staff of about 1.5 — a full-time designer and my part-time duties as editor. The vast majority of the content on the site is created by users. I’ve seen first-hand the power of user contributions as well as the difficulties they present. Given that the pool of potential contributors to a website with a local focus is an order of magnitude smaller than that of Wikipedia, the model for user contributions must be examined. My suspicion is that the minimally directed nature of collaboration on Wikipedia would take a much longer time to replicate on a local scale.
• Business model: Several possibilities exist for creating and sustaining such a site, and each presents different advantages and challenges. Enumerating and investigating these possibilities will increase the magnitude of the project’s impact.
• Storytelling and journalism standards: What does a corrections policy look like on a site that is always changing? How does Wikipedia’s “Neutral Point of View” model align with traditional notions of journalistic objectivity, and is either model appropriate for such a site? How might the site incorporate or interact with the increasing range of storytelling techniques available to us?
• Existing models: Several examples exist of geographically focused sites clearly inspired by the Wikipedia model. What can we learn from these efforts?

As well as a prototype illustrating a prospective news site structured according to this model, I would use my time at the Institute to produce a manuscript elucidating my findings. The document would serve as a roadmap for companies or communities seeking to make the idea a reality.

Journalism faces plenty of pressing questions, and I have an interest in many of them. But this question of what the next-generation news website looks like is one of the most pressing, and more than ample to capture my attention for a year. I would savor the opportunity to partner with you in pursuit of an answer.

1. I hate the title “Wikipedia-ing the News.” I slapped it onto the proposal at the last minute, and everyone who sees it instantly thinks, “Ah, he wants to make news sites into wikis.” I don’t. A wiki might very possibly be the best sort of a CMS to handle a site like this, but I’m totally unwilling to make that presupposition at this point. And as I try to make clear in the third paragraph, I’m using Wikipedia as a model for how it structures its content, not how it develops that content. At any rate, the title is an homage to Shayne Bowman, Ellen Kampinsky and Chris Willis’ “Amazoning the News.” [↩]