Newsless.org

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.