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 [↩]

My research proposal was called “Wikipedia-ing the News.” I’ve spent many posts chronicling the wonders of Wikipedia. Yet, as I’ve mentioned, the news site I’m creating to illustrate the arguments I’ve been advancing here will not be a wiki.¹ Why am I such a hypocrite?

I decided early on that given the time and resource constraints on my fellowship project, I would have to keep the site’s scope tight. As a result, there are tons of components of journalism’s evolution that this project will not significantly touch on — things like business models, social networking, and the world of mobile.

One of the things we heard loud and clear from the folks who led local wiki projects was that wikis are like gardens. They require a sustained investment of time and energy up front to make them truly valuable over the long term. Once the wiki is live, the community has to be nurtured, and goals and expectations must be set before the value of public editing starts to become plain. According to Mike Ivanov, one of creators of DavisWiki, he and the site’s other founding contributors spent months seeding the wiki with hundreds of articles on Davis before opening the site up to the public. I realized early that we probably wouldn’t have enough time to put in the investment to make the wiki worth it.

A lesser consideration in my decision to forgo the wiki was the feature set of available software. Playing around with open-source wiki packages such as MediaWiki and Expression Engine, I found that support for multimedia wasn’t the best out of the box. (The subject we’re covering — growth and development in Columbia, MO — will require a fair amount of multimedia to present effectively.) I also had some worries about how much flexibility the software would give us with the site design.

Finally, one of the things I most hope to demonstrate is that there’s nothing magical about a particular piece of software that enables the principles of journalism I’m arguing for. Focusing on delivering context doesn’t require a wiki, it requires a shift in purpose.

All that said, if this were an open-ended project, I absolutely would have made it a wiki. With enough time, we would have figured out design and multimedia. And if we succeeded in convening a community invested in the site, public contributions could be invaluable. I had a brief love affair with a little software package called Bitweaver, before deciding against using it in production. I’m tremendously intrigued about the possibilities for projects such as Semantic MediaWiki. Wiki software is only going to get more robust and interesting in the years to come. It’s awesome to see news organizations such as the Washington Post and Jacksonville.com experimenting with it. I’m sure one of my departing recommendations to the Missourian when I complete this fellowship will be to investigate transitioning the site to a wiki over the long term.

1. In case you’re wondering, I’ve decided to use Wordpress. [↩]

The other day’s post on following the news started up a meaty little discussion. I considered posting this in that thread, but my thoughts were coalescing into a post of their own, so here it is.

I think it’s worth quoting Bill Dunphy’s reply at length:

What you’re describing is, plain and simply, bad journalism. A failure to test critical assertions in an important ongoing public issue is simply a failure to do your job as a journalist. … The failure you’re pointing to, while common, has nothing to do with the medium really, or the concept of daily (or weekly) journalism. The failure is one of quality of work.

You don’t need a damn new taxonomy or community wiki. You just need a journalist who gives a damn, and editor who cares and a paper that earns enough money that they can employ otherwise non-revenue producing people like that.

Sadly we have been failing on the first two conditions for years – and decades – and now we’re failing on the third.

I hear a contradiction here, worth highlighting because I think it’s a common contradiction in our industry’s conversation with itself. On the one hand, Bill argues that these problems in coverage are particular to the situation, not systemic — a failure of individual journalists to do their jobs. On the other hand, Bill implies that the problems are, in fact, systemic — “we” are all agents of a decades-long, system-wide failure.

Part of the reason I don’t find the individual failure argument compelling is that I just don’t think it’s true. I’m working with these editors. One of the reporters involved in the coverage showed up in the earlier thread. They are as talented and dedicated a set of professionals as any I’ve seen.

Convene a jury of decorated editors and ask them to evaluate any of the coverage I read, and I think they’d say the stories were well-written on the whole, perspectives were typically well-balanced, and the reporting was tenacious. They’d be asking themselves, “How well did the newspapers cover that sewer issue?” And they’d be answering, as would I, “Pretty well.” By the standards of the system, it was good journalism.

What I’m saying is that I think those standards — the benchmarks of success systemic to journalism — are misguided. I’m asking broader questions, such as, “How well are we advancing the debate this community is having with itself?” And by those standards, the journalism fell far short.

Look at the current debate over the financial press’ coverage leading up to the economic meltdown, and you’ll find the exact same dynamic.¹ In this casting, the American Journalism Review plays the role of my hypothetical jury of editors. The magazine examined the work of the financial press and issued a resounding thumbs-up. Numerous stories warned of the dangers of subprime lending and collateralized debt obligations. Business journalists widely acknowledged the existence of a housing bubble. By these standards, the business press should be commended for having done excellent journalism.

I’ll leave the rebuttal to CJR:

But assembling a list of good stories strikes me as a little too simple. This isn’t about individuals, after all, but news organizations and the business press as an institution. Any fair measure of press performance will have to take some measure of the record in its entirety. What was the business-press narrative about, generally speaking? What else was written about Wall Street and the financial-services industry? Who was on the covers?

Were the good stories the rule or the exception that proves it?

Like me, CJR has broadened the questions, and like me, so far they seem to find the journalism wanting. On the individual level, reporters and editors were performing splendidly. The failure is in the system.

The sunny side to systemic failures is that they pave the way for systemic solutions. I actually believe the forms that have contained journalism — the article, the general-interest news product, the “24-hour news cycle” — have made it easier for these failures to occur. I believe our attention to scoops rather than synthesis and our preference for immediacy over importance weakens our journalism. I believe our unwillingness to facilitate our communities’ conversations beyond the occasional article weakens the impact of our journalism.

But I’m hopeful some of the forms that are emerging, such as wikis and blogs, begin to introduce a sort of purpose and flexibility that might make journalism fundamentally better. Of course you don’t need a wiki to provide context. But it presents a greater bias towards context than that 9-inch news hole that’s gotta get filled this afternoon.

1. A special hat tip here to Jay Rosen, who’s been calling my attention to this phenomenon a lot over the past few months. [↩]

It rarely fails. When I’m talking about my project, whether I introduce it or not, the word “wiki” will always pop up in the discussion. Sometimes I try to preempt it — “I called my project ‘Wikipedia-ing the News,’ but that’s a misnomer, since the prototype probably won’t be publicly editable …” — but even then, folks invariably come away convinced that the core idea of my project is that news sites should be open to public editing. I’m definitely not saying they shouldn’t, mind you, but the whole issue is askance of my focus with this research project.

Partly to illustrate that point, and partly to get some dialogue going, let me outline a few possible community contribution models a Newsless.org-certified news site could follow, if a traditional news organization were to start it:

• Closed to non-newsroom contributions: All edits to stories are made by newsroom staff, just the way they are on most big-media news sites today. For better or worse, this is the model we’ll likely use for the prototype, though I do want to make sure we provide a robust forum for community engagement.¹
• Completely open to non-newsroom contributions: A straight-up wiki, through and through.
• A mix of closed and open sections: The Wikipedia model. Particularly controversial topics could be placed under edit restrictions, while lower-intensity subjects could be open to public editing.
• Community contributions are moderated: There are many ways that could work. For example, here are two:
  • The newsroom controls a “final” version of the site, and a “draft” version is open to the community. Similar to the way most open-source software projects work. In the default view, all content has been vetted by authorized editors, but if you wanted to contribute information, you could add it to the draft version of any page. At regular intervals, editors vet new contributions to the draft site and commit valid changes to the core site.
  • Community members’ edits are held in moderation until approved. Similar to the one above, but there’s only one version of the site. Another twist on this approach is that you might allow good contributors to gain automatic edit rights if their edits are consistently approved.

Many potential approaches, each with certain tradeoffs and advantages. Any of them could work with the structural transformation in journalism we’re outlining here.

1. Although comments on stories clearly count as “community contributions,” I’m excluding them from all of these models. For the purposes of this post, let’s define “contributions” as edits or addition to the core site content. [↩]

Even though I’m more interested in the “-pedia” part than the “wiki” part, I’m not altogether uninterested in the latter. As I begin laying the groundwork for the prototype we’ll be constructing next semester, I’m working with a doctoral student, Kyle Heim, to interview the top editors of some of the most robust local wiki projects around — DavisWiki (Davis, CA), RocWiki (Rochester, NY), OmahaWiki (Omaha, NE), and WikiProject Columbia (Columbia, MO – actually part of Wikipedia itself).

We hope to get a sense from these editors about everything from the goals and scope of their sites, to whom they see as their audiences, to their relationships with official news outlets in their cities, to how they’ve organized the project.

Any other examples of sites in this vein you think we should explore? (I have another post coming, on efforts by news sites to package their stories together by topic.)