Newsless.org

I promised RJI’s communications director that I’d put together material for an e-mail that might be useful for the Institute’s mailing list. If you’re a regular reader, you’ll recognize many of these thoughts from my posts here, but you might still find this interesting. Happy 2009, and thanks for reading!

In the conversations about the seismic shifts rocking journalism today, much has been said about community participation in journalism, the proliferation of multimedia storytelling formats, the rise of mobile platforms and the departure of traditional advertising vehicles. Less has been said about how these developments relate to another fundamental shift in the landscape — our society’s 180-degree reversal from being starved of information to being drowned in it. But now that study after study has reinforced this fact, news industry leaders are starting to wrap their minds around adapting journalism to the overload age.

Addressing overload — weaving a mess of disconnected headlines into a coherent, compelling structure — is one of the basic premises of my work at RJI. In the inaugural entry on Newsless.org, I put it this way: “I want to hear much, much less about the future of news, and much more about the future of context. I want to shift the focus of our books and conferences from how we’ll deliver the latest developments to how we’ll help our audiences better understand the state of our world.”

As we engineer our experiment in delivering context, we’ve been asking ourselves a lot of questions to help focus our efforts. I thought I’d share some of them and invite your comments, challenges, footnotes and annexations: Read the rest of this entry »

^ Just in case anyone accuses me of not alliterating enough.

Today, approx. 40 years after the rest of the Web figured out how to do good discussions, general-interest news site comment threads mostly remain abysmal. On their best days. They are also the biggest thorn in the side of many an editor.

Many have enumerated where news site discussions often go the way of the suck (including, most helpfully, Derek Powazek):

• Anonymous posting.
• Non-threaded discussions.
• No newsroom participation.
• Forum ghettos.
• Hot-button issues.
• No reputation/ranking/filtering.

Folks are having thoughtful conversations about whether general-interest news can even support communities. I think they can. I’d argue that most of the problems identified above are symptoms of a single underlying affliction: News sites lack persistent, manageable points of focus around which communities can coalesce.

The best communities online all have the feeling of a semi-exclusive club. They cohere around distinctive goals, topics or personalities; they acquire in-jokes, shorthand, traditions; they’re open to newcomers, but oldtimers command respect. They sometimes sprout, like sidewalk grass, in the unlikeliest places, but often grow to resemble each other.

Most online editors have a fond story to tell about a close-knit community that sprung up improbably in a poorly-tended ’90s-era bulletin board in some abandoned crevice of their site. Or a popular blog with a good crowd of commenters.

But ask about the discussions in the news sections and their features will darken, their voices will coarsen, and you’ll be treated to a spittle-flecked recounting of racist rants, libelous tirades, comments mocking murder victims, and the like. The Internet’s id is not a pretty thing, and news story comments are its cavern.

News comments resemble graffiti more than discourse. Largely anonymous taggers come by and leave their marks. Sometimes their work is in response to another tagger, but most often, it’s a subtle variation on “I was here.” Like graffiti, comments are sometimes brilliant, but more frequently are garish and crude.

Unlike Gawker, I think we can fix comments. It is possible to have phenomenal discussions online. Even on general-interest news sites. In the course of my research, I’m considering some of the problems and mulling how my model might offer potential solutions. Derek Powazek’s contribution on this front was fantastic. I’d like to extend his thinking in a couple directions. Here’s what I got so far. Read the rest of this entry »

A bold argument: 2008 summoned the best overall election coverage I’ve ever seen.¹ That is, the nature of our current information ecoystem — a rapidly maturing blogosphere, large news organizations working to adapt, the mainstreaming of participation on the Web — brought about a dramatic step forward in election coverage this year.

Name a type of coverage or commentary citizens look for in an election year, and I bet I can make a case that it was done far better this cycle than in the recent past. Let’s walk through a few examples: Read the rest of this entry »

1. Granted, that’s not an enormous sample size. Also, although it may seem like it, I’m not actually contradicting my last post, which made the point that the coverage was incapable of matching the storytelling opportunity presented by the events of this year. That’s still true. [↩]

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.

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.