Newsless.org

As panic over the fate of journalism in America reaches a fever pitch, I’m dismayed how much of it continues in this ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ dichotomy that I thought had ended with the ‘who’s a journalist’ wars. I’m still reading criticisms of bloggers who don’t do any original reporting, or reporters whose work doesn’t match their professed standards of objectivity. In my darker moments, I’ll confess to thinking sinister thoughts about cable news personalities who engorge the public with an endless stream of trivia.

As we confront what we’ve lost in the decades-long contraction of the newspaper industry, and as we begin to figure out what we needed but never had, we have to reframe this conversation in purely first-person terms. It’s our society that has to evolve a journalism ecosystem to meet its information needs. It’s a bit of a forehead-slapper to write this, but we’re all in this together, folks.

I thought about this as I read Paul Starr’s excellent report on the decline of the traditional press and Yochai Benkler’s equally excellent rebuttal. Starr’s story is peppered with a panoply of thems; each section invokes the familiar faceless hordes that have long lent authority to news accounts — “some observers,” “many journalists,” “some critics.” That trope has been the downfall of many a news story, given that it’s often used to set up either a straw man or a he-said-she-said moment. The most effective elements of Benkler’s response draw on his tendency to recast those moments with an “I,” “we” or “our.” As in, “I think we do not have good research to know whether this system is also working for local politics and potential corruption as well. This, as Starr shows, is an important area we need to study and understand.” That “we” is universal; it’s any of us. It suggests any citizen might (must!) play a role in understanding this gap.

If a central element of the undoing of the traditional press is unbundling — the diminishing power of jointly packaging advertising and news, the atomization of formerly coherent monopoly news products into info-snippets on blogs and aggregators — a central element of journalism’s renewal will be connection — our ability and responsibility to all play shifting, complementary roles in a potentially vast system of journalism.

Today I’ve seen plenty of variants on a remark about Jon Stewart’s evisceration of Jim Cramer: “Why didn’t a journalist do that?” Answer: Because the role Stewart played is no longer reserved for journalists, if it ever was. Any of us can unleash a devastating act of media criticism, as Stewart did, or re-tweet such an act where and when we find it.

In all the coverage I read about growth and development in Columbia, Mo., the most significant investigative package didn’t come from the Missourian or the Tribune. It was a pair of studies done by citizen activist and university professor Ben Londeree, conducted with all the rigor of an academic. Londeree sought an answer to the question of how much it cost Columbia to hook new developments up to water and sewer connections, roads, and other infrastructure, as compared with the fees the city exacts from developers for their projects. Working with an activist group called the Smart Growth Coalition, he surveyed 40 Midwestern cities (.doc) to get an average of similar costs and fees elsewhere, to see how Columbia stacked up. Then, he compiled a dizzying array of variables specific to Columbia to estimate a figure for the city. And he was transparent about his methodology:

Community websites were studied to obtain as much information as possible about these financing issues. Some websites either didn’t have the information needed for the survey or I was unable to locate it. The most difficult to pin down is the category of exactions for off-site infrastructure because these typically are negotiated at the time of annexation, rezoning, or plan approval.

After the website search, the data were e-mailed to each community’s CEO (mayor or city manager) to verify for accuracy and completeness. A second request was e-mailed to non-responders about four weeks later. Since many still did not reply, telephone calls were made to planning departments and public works departments with excellent cooperation. In several cases, these calls helped to identify additional fees charged by a separate entity such as the county, metropolitan districts, benefit districts, co-ops, and private utilities.

As it happened, Londeree’s studies got quite a bit of local press. The next few years would see the Smart Growth Coalition expand its profile in Columbia city government. Advocates of the coalition’s ideas have now won four out of seven seats on the City Council.

Maybe once upon a time a group of reporters would have beaten Londeree to the punch, or replicated and extended his work to give it that journalistic seal of approval. We’re not in that world anymore. Our society’s welfare will increasingly depend on citizens taking on work that ambitious, as members of non-profits, for-profits, universities, knitting clubs, and every other type of organization out there. And it will depend equally on our ability to evaluate the work not by who did it — not whether it was “us” or “them” — but by how it was done.

Ezra Klein blogged yesterday about what he calls “one of the more frustrating tensions in political journalism,” riffing off this quote from the NYT’s Matt Bai:

Generally speaking, political writers don’t think so much of political scientists, either, mostly because anyone who has ever actually worked in or covered politics can tell you that, whatever else it may be, a science isn’t one of them. Politics is, after all, the business of humans attempting to triumph over their own disorder, insecurity, competitiveness, arrogance, and infidelity; make all the equations you want, but a lot of politics is simply tactile and visual, rather than empirical. My dinnertime conversation with three Iowans may not add up to a reliable portrait of the national consensus, but it’s often more illuminating than the dissertations of academics whose idea of seeing America is a trip to the local Bed, Bath & Beyond.

Klein makes a wonderful point:

Obviously, that doesn’t make much sense. Matt Bai’s conversations with those three Iowans would have gone fairly far towards explaining what those three Iowans thought was driving their vote. But though people don’t tell themselves that they’re tribal creatures who rationalize their attachments and make judgments based on the state of macroeconomic indicators, that explanation fits the data a lot better than anything Bai would have heard over dinner. Indeed, imagine those were Democratic Iowans. In 2004, they would have told Bai that they really believed it important to have a former war hero leading the nation in these times of peril and crisis. In 2008, that wouldn’t have been important to them at all, and instead, they’d have been more interested in a new direction and something called “change.” What people tell you about their vote often tells you a lot more about what they’ve been told about their vote than about why they’re voting the way they are.

But Bai’s piece does lay bare the journalistic tendency to prize “talking to people about stuff” over “learning about stuff.” If I call up Peter Orszag and ask him about the budget outlook, I’m “reporting.” So too if I attend a press conference and listen to other people ask Peter Orszag about the budget outlook. But if I spend a couple hours at my desk reading CBO and OMB documents, I’m not “reporting.” I’m researching. And to get an idea of how the guild distinguishes between the two, note that though a lot of journalists call themselves “reporters,” none call themselves “researchers.”

If this democracy business is going to work out in the long run, all the “us”es of world are going to have to stop sorting people into “them”s and snorting at them. That goes double for journalists.

As this all shakes out, I am confident we will emerge with a corps of individuals who claim journalism as their livelihood. Some small segment will be Sy Hersh-ian muckrakers, rock stars and outliers, stalking through shadowy worlds to singlehandedly expose untold corruptions. But many of them will be Josh Marshalls, for whom investigative journalism could not be done without a thousand engaged citizens each doing a tiny piece of it, and ten thousand more ponying up ten dollars in support of it.

Just as newspapers have lost their monopolies on their audiences, journalists have lost a monopoly on journalism. The responsibility for gathering information and evaluating it has spread throughout the citizenry. We have to figure out how to make that work. All of us. I’m confident we will.

I’m often asked, “Do people really want context? Say you build out all these neat-o topic pages laying out the context behind the headlines. Do you really think anyone’s going to read that stuff?”

I say I don’t look at it as a matter of whether people want context, but when.

If you told me in July of 2007 that one of the hottest articles on StarTribune.com would be a detailed explanation of the workings of gusset plates and roller bearings in bridge engineering, I would have raised a very quizzical eyebrow. But when that bridge fell in August, gusset plates were the new Britney Spears.

Traffic to any given Wikipedia topic probably accrues over a long tail of time. Today, most folks probably have no interest in knowing about people who’ve had pies thrown at them. But chances are that over the years — probably in beer-friendly settings — a reasonable crowd of people will find themselves looking up that time Thomas Friedman dodged a pie at Brown University. Likewise, the Sarah Palin page that drew only a quiet, steady stream of interest for years suddenly lit up one day in August ‘08, for obvious reasons.

Road infrastructure financing isn’t a sexy topic. Headlines on bonds for road projects may languish unread while cute puppy photos get all the pageviews. But we’ll build and tend that road financing topic page anyway. And one day, when a bumpy ride or flattened tire has you wondering why your city has all these #$%@! potholes, we’ll be ready for you.

I’m not arguing that news organizations should create repositories of useless topics in the hope that one day some calamity will make those topics relevant. I’m saying journalists should ask themselves what’s most important for their communities to know, and cover it diligently. Not with the expectation that the coverage will draw an instant wave of traffic, but with the understanding that if it’s truly important, it will spark enough relevant news to draw a significant audience over time. And the more of that context we lay out, the more relevant we can be at any given moment. This is how we’ll begin to build relationships that matter with our communities.

By creating information assets, we make it likelier that our information will find our audiences when they want it. Consider the story of Jacqueline Dupree. One day, Jacqueline decided to start taking pictures of her a nearby neighborhood¹ to put on her website. She knew she wanted to document how the neighborhood was changing. Before long, the site had become a living history of an area in transition. Eventually, Jacqueline “reluctantly” found herself covering public meetings, publishing local data feeds, and generally creating a deeply comprehensive contextual record of the place.

Twenty months after Jacqueline began working on the site in earnest, the city announced it was building a stadium in the neighborhood. The site took off, and won a Batten Award for Innovation last year. Take a look, it’s not hard to see why.

Context as an engine for news

A focus on context also changes the definition of what we consider news. As my team creates these topic pages, we’re finding gaps in our understanding, stories that have fallen off our radar, and an infinite well of other fodder for further reporting. It turns out that when you attempt to assemble the most important information you have on a place, you begin to realize there’s no such thing as a slow news day. As I’ve said before:

Not two weeks ago, the Star Tribune’s reader representative was complaining about the midsummer absence of news. If we committed to providing regular updates on those important stories, we would be unearthing legitimate news that too often gets buried by the tyranny of recency. “Still No Action On Strengthening Levees,” the headlines might have said. “Bridges Languish in Need of Repair.” And if the warnings aren’t heeded, at least we will have traced the progress of a possible disaster before the fact, giving us unprecedented insight into what went wrong and when.

If truth is an asymptote, great journalism has no end.

The other day, Howard Weaver left a comment that seems appropriate to mention here:

For years I’ve warned newsrooms against the kind of thinking that led an educator to pronounce, “I was teaching, but they weren’t learning.” Impossible. And I think we need to embrace a similar responsibility: if 50% of the public still thinks Saddam was involved in 9-11, or that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, journalism has failed. Even if we did everything right, perfectly, by established standards, we have to be judged by the outcomes, not the inputs.

The upshot of my entire argument in this blog is that journalism’s highest purpose is delivering understanding. We don’t just cover the news for the sake of telling people what happened; we cover the news to help our communities understand themselves better, so they can improve. A story about a homicide might have some intrinsic value, but the greater value emerges when that story teaches its audience something about why homicide happens in a community and how the next one might be prevented. If we’re doing our jobs right, every such tragedy in a community becomes another hook to the larger story about how these tragedies might be stopped.

Using the news as a hook for context doesn’t mean running versions of the same story over and over again. It means reporting until we’ve exposed enough of the broader context of an issue for it to reach an audience. And when it finds that audience, it means giving them a means to discuss and debate and extend the story.

After New York Times reporter David Barstow unloaded a massive, months-long investigation into the Pentagon’s deployment of “military analysts” on television news shows last April, the news networks said nary a word. The story has since proceeded along a familiar path: Barstow wrote a follow-up story in November, trying to keep the issue in the spotlight. Another follow-up last month (the Defense Dept’s inspector general found no wrongdoing in the Pentagon propaganda program) was downgraded from the front page to A11. Any rage that boiled amongst the American people after the publication of the initial story has cooled to a simmer over time. And if someday the government is found to have launched another more insidious propaganda campaign, the New York Times will say, “We taught, but they didn’t learn.”²

I remember my own anger and disbelief when I read that original story in on NYTimes.com on the evening of April 19th, reciting aloud some of the sordid revelations to my boyfriend. I scanned the Sunday talk show transcripts the next day for mentions of the story, certain it was only a matter of time before it snowballed into a giant scandal. And when the networks were silent, I wanted more. Maybe a wiki that would trace the ongoing television appearances of all these well-compensated former generals and their connections to the defense industry. Or a Firefox plugin that could slip in a message on any page I viewed that mentioned one of the exposed “analysts” — talk about relevance.

A focus on delivering context means that the news is never the endpoint. The giant investigation doesn’t conclude with the Sunday A1 story, it erupts into something bigger. And the trail of a story doesn’t end with the passage of a bill or the resignation of an official. It doesn’t end at all. It merely connects with more and more dots that form an ever-clearer picture of a better society.

1. Correction: Jacqueline doesn’t live in the neighborhood, but just outside of it. [↩]
2. All this is not to say the story didn’t have an effect. Congress clearly got the message, and even after the inspector general’s report, the GAO and FCC are still investigating the Pentagon program. But I think the only thing that could really keep this from happening again is a sort of enduring public vigilance that never really had a chance to blossom. [↩]

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.