Newsless.org

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.

You and I and most of our colleagues have grown up accustomed to the convention that most substantial journalism is delivered in a spare, impersonal, just-the-facts style. Although a robust tradition of narrative journalism has flourished over the past few decades, to the point where even the most impersonal story gets critiqued for its narrative appeal, our industry has a strong cultural attachment to the institutional voice. But for many reasons, I think the convention has outlived its usefulness, and needs to be euthanized.

First, let me eulogize it a little.

As best as I can tell, institutional voice ascended in popularity with the same trajectory and for similar reasons as the concept of “the brand” did. During the advancement of the industrial age, local suppliers of goods lost significant ground to much larger regional and national suppliers. “Brand reputation” became a substitute for personal reputation. (“I love that cheese made by Farmer McGinty down the road!” became “I love Kraft cheese!”)

In the same way, as news was industrialized, the news voice was an easy way to subsume individual reporters’ identities into the brand of the larger organization. Wire stories could be written and slotted into papers across the country without being tonally dissonant; news voice lent every story a sort of factory-made coherence.

Even better, the convention saved us space and time. It kept reporters from laying on self-indulgent personal asides and stylistic flourishes. At its best, it produced stories that were lucid, concrete and economical.

Over time, the institutional voice came to be closely associated with the increasingly popular (albeit increasingly oversimplified and misunderstood) principle of “objectivity” news organizations were espousing. The convention was a handy signal to readers that all personal perspectives and biases had been removed from a story before publication. It communicated authority and ideological neutrality.

But the news industry was laying itself a very dangerous trap.

After a while, news voice was so tightly coupled with the public understanding of journalism that folks began to mistake mere adherence to this [easily mimicked] stylistic convention for journalism itself. (Check the 2000 American Heritage entry for journalism, and you’ll find an alarming definition lurking among the other only-slightly-less-alarming ones: “The style of writing characteristic of material in newspapers and magazines, consisting of direct presentation of facts or occurrences with little attempt at analysis or interpretation.”)¹

Even worse, readers began to evaluate the journalism on the strength of its adherence to the institutional convention, rather than on the strength of the reporting behind it. If a reporter betrayed a hint of personal perspective in a news story — dropping a mildly loaded word, including a minimally subjective characterization — she could be pilloried for violating superficial conventions, no matter how well the story was reported.

Worst of all, news voice had the unfortunate side effect of hiding the reporting that lends all good journalism its credibility. By meticulously pruning out references to reporters’ methods and circumstances from every story, the industry deprived the public of the best tool to evaluate or understand the work reporters did. Shoddy work could sit alongside skillful work, all under the same institutional imprimatur, and readers were given few tools to tell the difference. To the untrained observer, it’s not easy to differentiate a two-source press release story from a piece built on weeks of FOIAs and footwork.

Meanwhile, we got outflanked by partisan hucksters who’ve exploited our dependence on news voice as a key weakness, promoting the value of personal authenticity over the institutional identity we staked our reputations on. Which do you suspect is more instinctively powerful — the cold, dehumanized voice of the Washington Post saying merely, “These are the facts,” or a demagogue like Bill O’Reilly telling you he’s on your side?

I think the best way to gain ground is not to engage in a battle over which institution is more trustworthy — the WaPo or BillO. That fight is too easy for us to lose. Instead, we’re going to have to start the slow, difficult work of shifting the terrain — forging more meaningful, less institutional relationships with our visitors; teaching people through our work how we acquire and evaluate information.

I think scrapping institutional voice is a great starting point, and organizations like ChiTown Daily News provide the best opportunity for doing it. The New York Times can’t really shift, at this point, away from news voice; it’s sort of built into the brand. But you’re creating something new, Geoff — informed by the best of the journalistic tradition, but unshackled from the worst journalistic conventions.

We’ve known for a while that great journalism doesn’t have a template. For my money, the best work of journalism done in the run-up to the Iraq War was James Fallows’ “The Fifty-First State” in the Atlantic, which presaged everything we should have known going into that war. Among the article’s most notable characteristics is Fallows’ willingness to show his work — the story begins with a remarkable catalogue of Fallows process and assumptions. Almost everybody quoted is on the record (side note: just think of the thousands of inches of anonymously sourced stories that totally got it wrong right around this time), and we see Fallows’ perspective shift as the piece progresses. By putting all that in there, Fallows makes the story accessible, engaging, and deeply informative, not overly reflective or self-indulgent.

Of course, Fallows was writing a magazine cover story. You’re making a website. So I’d point you to examples from the blogosphere, where some great journalists (e.g. Matthew Cooper, Greg Sargent, Ezra Klein) are pioneering non-institutional, highly engaging formats for news. And I’d encourage you to take a careful look at how these folks are doing it, because I think this last point is key:

Doing this well is harder than writing stories in institutional voice.

It is both easy and intuitive to pop out a story in news voice. In fact, at its worst, the format encouraged a sort of laziness we still see all the time. But leaving that convention behind means you’ll have to learn some new rules, be mindful of a new set of pitfalls (e.g. self-indulgence, oversharing, I-think-you-know-the-biggies), and bring your audience along.

In the long run, I think this will reap you all sorts of benefits, and it’ll get much easier with practice. And there’s nothing that says you have to start every story with a first-person narrative lede. Just consider yourself unshackled. And start playing around.

1. Just in case they update the entry, here it is as of 11/09: (1) The collecting, writing, editing, and presenting of news or news articles in newspapers and magazines and in radio and television broadcasts. (2) Material written for publication in a newspaper or magazine or for broadcast. (3) The style of writing characteristic of material in newspapers and magazines, consisting of direct presentation of facts or occurrences with little attempt at analysis or interpretation. (4) Newspapers and magazines. (5) An academic course training students in journalism. (6) Written material of current interest or wide popular appeal. [↩]

I’ve written a lot here about evolving journalism to enable it to tell larger stories. But how on earth do we tell the story of a year like this? This is a question I have no answer for.

The dominant story today is of course a narrative about race in America. A black man has been elected to lead a nation where just 40 years ago, you could be murdered for registering blacks to vote. It would be difficult enough to do justice to that story.

But race is only a segment of a deeply complex fractal of stories that emerged this year. And I find the greatest human pathos of the story of 2008 in the folds of that fractal, where the stories of race, class, sex, sexuality, gender, and generations intersect. If you’d frozen any moment of this year and traced the connections between the characters and incidents splashed on every front page, you’d have the setting for a drama as engrossing as any set to page or screen this year:

• Jeremiah Wright and Hillary Clinton, each seemingly convinced that America is not ready for a black President, both seem to try all they can to prove that conviction right.
• As Bill Clinton struggles to uplift his wife to office and thereby grasp some glimmer of redemption, John Edwards and Elliot Spitzer each re-enact his stunning fall from grace.
• John McCain, whose immense estate has brought him unending pressure in a populist year, pins his hopes on a working-class Everyman and an accomplished PTA mom from Alaska.
• As voters in California elect Barack Obama, who was born to a marriage which was then illegal in some states, they also amend their state constitution to prevent gays and lesbians from getting married.
• Chicago in 2008 finds itself caricatured as a den of anarchists and terrorists, summoning the ghosts of 40 years prior.
  

Even the minor characters in these dramas could have come straight out of Shakespeare’s head. People like Patty Solis-Doyle, Ashley Todd, Todd Palin, Bill Ayers, and Elizabeth Edwards all emerge from the year with fascinating stories to tell.

It feels important to me that these intersecting stories be told. I think 2008 has quite a lot to teach us. But I have no idea what shape that story could take.

All that said, though, I think the story’s power lies in the links. And I imagine the answer to my question will involve the link as well.

When I talk about the importance of context in journalism, I often invoke a quote by Will Tacy, my boss at the Star Tribune: “The article is not the story.”

To wit: the story of our present financial crisis is a web of inextricable realities that lack defined beginnings and endings and can be described — but never contained — by an article or set of articles. On the Web, the lowly, essentially static article often proves an insufficient instrument with which to present stories, yet the basic unit of today’s news site is still the article. For this reason, we still find it difficult to tell our most complex stories well on the Web.

From what I can tell, we inherited this state of affairs from our printed predecessors. When we started news sites, there was just no other plainly obvious way to present news stories, and most of those stories were coming from the newspaper at any rate. So we presented them on the Web the same way we do in print — discrete, self-contained compositions, including whatever context could fit into a paragraph or two, ornamented with photos and graphics.

But the format quickly began to strain under the pressure of being an unnatural vehicle for news on the Web. First, there was an early, striking dissonance between what was fixed forever on paper, and what appeared online. How to handle corrections? Minor updates?

Then, after we’d won the battle of publishing online first (minor insurgencies excepted), the terse, Web-first version of the article either changed drastically as the print deadline approached, got deleted altogether, or continued awkwardly to exist after the print version was up.

Updating online articles was another problem, especially during breaking news. What merited an annexation to an existent article and what required a new article altogether? How do you avoid the Frankenstein effect apparent when an article is altered by different editors over time? (If you were feverishly reloading the CNN website when results came in from this spring’s Democratic primaries, as I was, you saw the Frankenstein effect in living color.)

Some news sites are beginning to break away from using articles as their essential building blocks. You’re finding more and more ongoing developments handled by Web-native formats such as blogs — where adding context is a matter of adding a link, there’s enough continuity to grow a community around, and there are fewer limitations on length and voice. (For example, try clicking around on the headlines gracing the front page of the St. Pete Times site.) Wikis are another Web-native format, which is why they so elegantly handle both background and news.

We’ve been wedging our stories into articles for so long, it can be difficult to separate the two. But a big part of the opportunity before us is to start telling grand, complex and unending stories with tools fit for the task.