Newsless.org

Folks are emailing/Tweeting over links to Google’s “Living Stories” prototypes, done in collaboration with the New York Times and Washington Post. I’m about to hop a plane to Amsterdam to give a talk about the future of context, in which this idea plays a prominent role (as you know), so I figure I should lend some thoughts. (Update: Had to board before I finished the post, so I’m publishing from Amsterdam. Hoi!)

First, all the organizations involved deserve props for looking beyond the current news story format. Even with all its flaws, the static news article on the Web is an overwhelmingly dominant paradigm. To reimagine it – especially from within the walls of a giant, classical institution – takes vision.

Second, it’s not the most impressive incarnation of the ideas behind it. It feels a touch austere, like the quiet tinkerings of a Google engineer’s idle hours. I say that having built something much like it (without some of the cool bits). In fact, Columbia Tomorrow probably felt the same way to the folks who viewed it – “All those big ideas, and this is the product?”

The lack of sizzle is evident in Howie Kurtz’s story about the project. He calls it “a new online tool that, well, isn’t exactly going to revolutionize journalism.” I think NYT digital CEO Martin Nisenholtz gets it about right in the Times story about the initiative: “In it,” he says, “you can see the germ of something quite interesting.”

I don’t think the fact that it’s still only a “germ” at this point diminishes the thought or work that’s gone into these efforts. We really haven’t built anything quite like this before. Inventing the future takes time! And I suspect the first time many people laid eyes on Wikipedia, their reaction was much the same: Some fancy encyclopedia you got here. Um, there’s a typo on the “List of Goonies characters” page.

So I’m tremendously heartened by the fact that influential organizations are starting to act on these ideas. Every groping step away from the conceptual and toward the concrete pushes this conversation forward. The basic question – “What might this look like?” – becomes less relevant, leaving room for bolder and more interesting questions to sprout.

Right now, the main reaction flitting around in my head is this: both Columbia Tomorrow and Google’s living stories seem, from one angle, like a retreat from Wikipedia rather than a step toward (or beyond) it. They’re tugging the radical reality of the Wikipedia topic page – pure, organized, ever-changing – back to a somewhat familiar, news-oriented frame. What if we started with a Wikipedia topic page, and began to imagine how a newsroom could improve that? How might we improve the storytelling? What might the talk page become? What would bring people back to follow the story as it progresses?

Footnote: By the way, Danny Sullivan has the best take I’ve seen, if you want a read on how “Living stories” work.

@NicholasAllen asked me today what I thought about the Omaha World-Herald’s acquisition of the hyperlocal wiki site WikiCity.

When Gina Chen, who wrote up this bit of news on NiemanLab, first wrote about it in August, Perry Gaskill left a comment I think is still trenchant:

Sorry, Gina, but it strikes me that WikiCity could serve as a poster child for what’s generally wrong with the direction of hyper-local news efforts. Once again, what we’re seeing is a quasi-franchise business model based on selling low-CPM ads against freely generated content. Nothing special.

Spend any time wandering around WikiCity, and what you find is the same dog who doesn’t bark. No sense of each town’s quirkiness; no sense of place. Instead of a local cafe where the cook knows you like your eggs scrambled, you get an Egg McMuffin.

I’ll allow myself some snark here, ’cause I think it’s deserved. I would bet that most of what you need to know about this acquisition can be gleaned from this sentence in the World-Herald’s article about it: “WikiCity (http://www.wikicity.com) has more than 13 million Web site pages and is one of the largest ‘wikis’ in the world.”

How many of those millions of “Web site pages” do you think was ever touched by a real person? And how many will ever be seen by a single person?

WikiCity in its current state strikes me as a textbook example of a site built by robots. Such sites tend, in my experience, to appeal mostly to other robots.

Contrast it to Wikipedia, whose every page was built, word by work, link by link, on the actions of individual people. Or to Everyblock, whose pages run on powerful algorithms, lovingly engineered and hand-polished by a brilliant and careful team of makers. These are large sites built on millions of niches, but neither were built that way to start. Wikipedia began as a small collection of pages that became a massive collection over time. Everyblock started as a selection of data sets in a handful of cities, and has grown over the years to encompass hundreds of data sets in more than a dozen cities. They started small and built up, like every success story I know, rather than the reverse, which is the WikiCity approach.

“Scaling down” remains a problem for the Web, on site after site. Sites such as Wikipedia and Delicious function beautifully in domains where they can garner enough attention. If a Wikipedia topic is significant enough to draw the interest of even a dozen editors in a few months, chances are it will be pretty decent. But the more niche you get on Wikipedia¹, the shallower and spottier the pages become. Look for a popular topic like “usability” on Delicious, and you’ll find a wonderfully curated selection of links, courtesy of the wisdom of crowds. But for a significant topic outside the site’s core niche of designers and techies, Delicious underperforms.

Howard Owens has written passionate criticisms of approaches to “hyperlocal” news that start with a giant, anonymous maze of computer-generated pages, all alike, all imagining that users will spontaneously arrive to populate their pages with genuine, quality material. Everything I’ve seen tells me Howard’s criticisms are right. These efforts are attempts to bring a mass mentality to a niche world. I’ve never seen a successful wiki that wasn’t built like Wikipedia, from the bottom up, page by page.

If I were advising the World-Herald, I’d tell them to reboot WikiCity and start building a wiki just for Omaha. Better yet, start with just one of the city’s six regions. Build on what you can from Wikipedia – giving proper attribution, of course – but begin with the understanding that it’s not going to be very complete just yet. Assign someone to add as much information as they can to the site every day. Create a content plan to prioritize what information you’ll pursue first. Early on, create pages for the most trenchant issues affecting the neighborhood; diligently and prominently link to those pages when the issues appear in your coverage.

For months, I expect this exercise will seem like a neverending, pointless slog, and no one will join in. After a few months, your traffic will still be underwhelming, but you’ll notice a tiny stream of fellow-travelers who’ll timidly participate here or there. Keep at it, and in a year, you’ll have a small but dedicated community. And you will probably have built something more significant than you had realized. After two years, it will begin to seem like it was worth the investment.

Come to think of it, that last paragraph could probably be applied to most successful businesses on the Web.

1. That’s my neighborhood [↩]

For the longest time, whenever I read the news, I’ve often felt the depressing sensation of lacking the background I need to understand the stories that seem truly important. Day after day would bring front pages with headlines trumpeting new developments out of city hall, and day after day I’d fruitlessly comb through the stories for an explanation of their relevance, history or import. Nut grafs seemed to provide only enough information for me to realize the story was out of my depth.

I came to think of following the news as requiring a decoder ring, attainable only through years of reading news stories and looking for patterns, accumulating knowledge like so many cereal box tops I could someday cash in for the prize of basic understanding. Meanwhile, though, with the advancements of the Web and cable news, the pace of new headlines was accelerating—from daily to minute-by-minute—and I had no idea how I’d ever begin to catch up.

In 2008, I encountered a study describing others from my generation who seemed to share my dilemma. The Associated Press had commissioned professional anthropologists to track and analyze the behavior of a group of young media consumers. Their key conclusion: “The subjects were overloaded with facts and updates and were having trouble moving more deeply into the background and resolution of news stories.”

The study’s participants seemed to respond to this ever-deepening ocean of news much like I had. We would shy away from stories that seemed to require a years-long familiarity with the news and incline instead toward ephemeral stories that didn’t take much background to understand—crime news, sports updates, celebrity gossip. This approach gave us plenty to talk about with friends, but I sensed it left us deprived of a broader understanding of a range of important issues that affect us without our knowing.

Read the rest at Nieman Reports.

You can’t tell from my blogging, but I’ve gotten rather sensitive about the word “Wikipedia.”

Earlier this year, after I’d written my research proposal, I was casting about for a title to communicate the core concept I hoped to pursue. I recalled a whitepaper by Shayne Bowman, Ellen Kampinsky and Chris Willis called “Amazon-ing the News,” which I thought snappily conveyed what they were about. Just before sending it off to the folks at Reynolds, I slapped on the title “Wikipedia-ing the News,” with a little note-to-self to think of something better.

So now, every time my project gets introduced, the word “Wikipedia” is thrust into an expectant void, and opinions are formed before I say the first word about my research. Thus, as I mentioned, I’m a teensy bit sensitive. But it’s probably time to confront the W-bomb head-on.

When I mention Wikipedia, my listener’s full attention turns automatically to the “wiki” part. It’s editable by anyone. All of the tricky issues inherent in the public, anonymous provenance of the site’s information come rushing to mind before we even get to the “pedia” suffix. But that suffix is where my fascinations — and my research questions — begin.

Let’s get the wikinoia out of the way. The news site I’m theorizing will be completely agnostic as to who creates the content. You could make a version of this news site where all content comes from (1) a newsroom of professional reporters and editors, (2) a nebulous and voluntary set of “citizens from the community,” (3) a hybrid of professional journalists and community contributors (more on that much later), or (4) Maureen Dowd. I don’t care. (OK, except for 4, which would be a travesty. I do not in any way authorize the use of my ideas to further MoDo’s influence on the world.)

As I mentioned in my last post, “encyclopedia” is too small and ancient a word to describe Wikipedia. The site has no predecessor for how it organizes archival and contextual information while accommodating breaking news, how it shepherds dozens of competing voices towards consensus, how it manages to make information more valuable over time rather than less, how it incorporates communities, how it became t_{he most search-engine-optimized site on the Web} …

The site has no predecessor, period. There’s a ton for news sites to learn from it. And there are many questions to address for how to translate what we learn to a journalism context. It’s not the only inspiration or example I’ll draw on for this project, but it’s a big one.

Or: The 1991 problem

As I sort-of argue in my research proposal, Wikipedia isn’t an encyclopedia, but that’s the best word we’ve got. (Actually I called it a “useful shorthand,” but I meant that to be backhanded.) Given its unbound, dynamic, hyperlinked nature, we just don’t have the vocabulary to really describe what Wikipedia is, so we use the word encyclopedia as a familiar point of reference.

Call it the 1991 Problem. We’re still stuck with the language of 1991 while discussing the technologies of 2008.

Imagine yourself trying to describe an iPhone to an average Joe from 1991. By calling it a phone, you instantly constrain the fellow’s sense of what you’re describing. “Well, yes, it’s a telephone. But it doesn’t have any wires and you can use it from anywhere. Also, the whole thing is a computer that you operate by touching the screen. And it’s sort of a hyper-charged Walkman, too. Oh, and it can tell you where you are on a map, and which of your friends are nearby, and where the nearest pizza place is. And don’t get me started on visual voicemail …”

The iPhone is to the telephone what Wikipedia is to the encyclopedia.

en · cy · clo · pe · di · a [en-sahy-kluh-pee-dee-uh] – noun – 1) a book or set of books containing articles on various topics, usually in alphabetical arrangement, covering all branches of knowledge or, less commonly, all aspects of one subject.

When we say “encyclopedia,” that’s (^) what’s running through the head of Joe from 1991. Wikipedia encompasses a compendium of fantastically diverse pages, some of which are merely collections of links to other pages, each of which features a thoughtful conversation about the material included or excluded from the page. It’s a set of procedures for organizing vast and diverse subsets of information. It’s a sizeable and devoted community. It’s a Web application. “Encyclopedia” doesn’t even begin to cover it.

I want there to be a 1991 problem for news. I want to make a news site so novel and amazing Joe wouldn’t even know what hit him.