(START) Welcome and thanks
I said I’d talk about my project, and I will, but I want to talk more broadly also.
I want to talk about the journalism - what it did, what it does, what it should do - and let me be clear:
(SLIDE) When I say “journalism,” I’m not talking about an industry
(SLIDE) I’m referring to a civic function
Warning: I have a lot of ground to cover during this talk, so I’m going to move pretty briskly
But please, stop me if you’re stuck on any points I make
(SLIDE) A quick preview of what’s ahead
We talk about issues or problems a lot when we discuss the future of journalism, but I’m a glass-half-full kinda guy. So I’m going to talk about “opportunities.”
Briefly, I want to walk through current approaches to online journalism, and contrast them with my approach.
That’ll lead me into a discussion of the consequences of my approach, or how I’m thinking of meeting the opportunities the moment presents.
Then I’d like to open it up for conversation before we depart
(SLIDE) So let’s talk about these opportunities
(SLIDE) We hear a lot these days that a crisis is an opportunity in disguise
Mostly from progressives telling Obama to use the economic meltdown to push through a national health care program
More than a nugget of truth to this axiom
Can we all agree: journalism has never been perfect
And it probably won’t ever be, but we can take this moment - an industry in crisis - to address some of the imperfections of journalism as it’s practiced
When I talk about opportunities, I’m partially using it as a euphemism for “imperfections” about the practice of journalism today
My project - and my talk today - are both all about striving for a more perfect journalism, to borrow a phrase from our Founders
INFORMATION OVERLOAD
(SLIDE) First, let me ask you about Information Overload
"Stimulation Overload" might be a better term
(SLIDE) How many of you feel as though you’re overloaded with information?
OK, that was a gimme question. Stories about info overload have been low-hanging fruit for decades now.
(SLIDE) So a real question: for most of you, are news organizations helping or hurting that situation?
Raise hands: Helping? Hurting?
This is a key premise: if you take nothing else away from this talk, understand this
(SLIDE) We have already shifted from a state of information scarcity to information overload
Today’s journalism is STILL structured around information scarcity
We talk about "filling the news hole"
Broadcasters talk about "localizing" news stories
(Not meant in the sense of making a national story more relevant to a local constituency, but essentially repeating a news story done elsewhere on a local scale)
(SLIDE) One of the biggest organizing principles behind journalism as it’s practised today is TELLING MORE STORIES
We don’t actually NEED more stories
We don’t need journalists to tell us what happened at the city council meeting
We don’t need journalists to tell us the story of last night’s game
We don’t need journalists to speculate on who Obama’s cabinet is going to be
(SLIDE) What we NEED is LARGER STORIES
We need someone to tell us what last night’s city council meeting means for us
Or what last night’s game means for our team
Or what Obama’s cabinet choices mean for our country
For the past however-many decades, our goal has been to find more things each day for everybody to worry about
When I load up a news website, or watch a broadcast, more often than not what I see is news - a new headline, a new phenomenon, a new crime or crash or spectacle
This is actually debilitating
The net effect is that whenever I encounter “the news” these days, I feel LESS informed, not MORE so
(SLIDE) And it’s not just me
This quote is from an AP study published earlier this year, where they followed a bunch of young consumers and tracked their information consumption habits
"The abundance of news and ubiquity of choice do not necessarily translate into a better news environment for consumers. … Participants in this study showed signs of news fatigue; that is, they appeared debilitated by information overload and unsatisfying news experiences. … Ultimately news fatigue brought many of the participants to a learned helplessness response. The more overwhelmed or unsatisfied they were, the less effort they were willing to put in."
We wring our hands a lot about young folks turning away from the news
This is an utterly rational reaction to the information environment they’re in
When reading the news consistently makes you feel less informed and less empowered, why on earth would you do it?
Especially when your infosphere is saturated with information that is (1) more focused, (2) more immediate, and (3) more graspable
Many of us have all but given up on the notion that following the news can make us more informed
Now we tune into the news for a slice of life, a diverting story, something interesting
Once again, this is an opportunity
What me and others like me lack, in large part, is UNDERSTANDING
What *should* we be concerned about, and how can we turn those concerns into action
(SLIDE) I want to hear much, much less about the future of news and much more about the future of UNDERSTANDING
That is the single largest opportunity my project aims to address
THE NEWS CYCLE VS. REALITY
But of course, there are other opportunities as well
Let’s talk about the timing of reality for a second
(SLIDE) The pace of life
A dirty little secret of the news cycle is that life doesn’t happen in neat 24-hour snippets
Our news formats are not flexible enough to handle the pace of most news stories
(SLIDE) Let me give you an example of a format that causes a lot of trouble: the article
The essential constraint of the news article is that it has to have a beginning, a middle and an end - a lede, a nut graf, and a conclusion
This totally breaks down when you’re in a breaking news situation
(SLIDE) Here’s what happens these days in a newspaper newsroom when news breaks
At first, all we know is that something happened - a bus crashed somewhere on Highway 70
That’s hardly an article all by itself, but we usually scrape whatever we can into a pathetic little Web nugget as soon as possible
As the day wears on and information rapidly streams in, we all too quickly realize that this story is actually sort of two completely different stories - a traffic story and a behind-the-accident story - that are really awkward in the same article
So do we fork the article? Split it up into sections? Who knows!
Then, when the paper goes to press, we’ve got this print story … do the articles written for online continue to live, or are they overwritten?
Talk about the CNN primary article
(SLIDE) The breaking-news troubles are just one example of the problems our legacy journalism formats have always been stuck with
The Web tends to expose the problems with these formats
But it also offers the opportunity to use different formats that avoid those problems
CHEAP TALK
I could go on talking about opportunities all day, but I just want to mention one more
(SLIDE) Have you ever noticed that discussions on news websites are usually kind of awful?
(SLIDE) I go to the WashPost website this morning and see this headline about NPR cutting jobs
I just knew what I’d find in the comments, and sure enough
(SLIDE) It’s not that this is an invalid point-of-view, it’s just that the discussion is so predictable and simplistic
And for most news stories, you’d be lucky if you got away with predictable and simplistic
The abysmal discussion on news sites is a symptom of a deeper phenomenon
(SLIDE) News sites don’t offer many amenable places for communities to convene
We sometimes have forums, and more of us allow comments on our stories these days
But forums are typically poorly promoted and ghettoized to some obscure corner
And the commenters have no way to become anything other than strangers
When we do blogging right, our blogs can often become the bright spots for communities to flourish on our sites
And we know the Web is excellent for online communities in general
So how can we bring some of that mojo to general-interest journalism?
I think that’s a huge opportunity.
(SLIDE) So in summary, once again
MOST IMPORTANT - News sites exacerbate our info overload
The formats we use most are ill-suited to capturing reality
Our sites aren’t very conducive to forming communities
APPROACHES
(SLIDE) So let’s talk in practical terms about current approaches to online journalism
I want to contrast how journalism looks now, to how I hope it will look when I’m done with this research
(SLIDE) I’m going to use a local story as a case study
Here’s the super-quick skinny on the Crosscreek story
(SLIDE) The Crosscreek Center is a new shopping development that just passed through City Council in August
After a year of really acrimonious meetings between developers and residents
As many local stories do, it unfolded bit by bit over the past year
Through City Council meetings and Planning & Zoning Commission meetings
And it exposed lots of issues with the city’s planning process
If you’re a user of the Missourian’s website, this is how you’d typically encounter the Crosscreek story
(SLIDE) You come to the website, and maybe you see a headline like this
And maybe for whatever reason you click into the story and read the lede and the nut graf
OK, so maybe you’re interested, but you want to know more about this story
(SLIDE) Fortunately the Missourian has packaged together all sorts of related articles on Crosscreek
Except it’s kind of a lot of headlines, and you don’t know what to read first
And you also don’t want to read through a bunch of articles to figure out why this is on the front page of the Missourian website
Maybe you’ll have more luck with the search engine
The Missourian makes two search engines available, and here’s what they return
(SLIDE) Seriously?? Lots more headlines? Who has time to read through all this? Lame! I’m outta here
(SLIDE) For an info consumer like me, is this experience ideal?
Why or why not?
(SLIDE) OK, here’s what I’d say:
First off, it would require quite a bit of work for me to piece together the larger story here
All I know is that some proposal out on Stadium and 63 was tabled
And I’m left with no idea where it goes from here
When should I tune back in if I want to know more?
Mostly, how does this affect *me*? Why is this valuable for me to know?
This approach leaves me with more questions, rather than answering my questions
I’m not picking on the Missourian here
Most news sites struggle with similar issues
The news site I’ve seen that’s putting in the best effort on tackling this is the NY Times
How many of you have seen Times Topics?
Since they haven’t covered the Crosscreek story, I’m going to use the auto industry bailout as an example
They seem to have put a lot of work into this
They’ve got the latest developments
But they also have a lengthy writeup explaining the history and current status of the topic
And they’re doing this for pretty much every story they cover, from the bailout to Blagojevich
I definitely think the Times coverage is a step in the right direction, but it still leaves me with some problems
(SLIDE) First, it still requires a lot of work for me to grasp the story
Many topics have a basic writeup, but then just a giant list of headlines to get the full overview of the story
I need hierarchy, I need synthesis
And I want to know how this relates to other stories
Don’t just give me links to "related topics," tell me how they relate!
So those are the issues I’m considering with my approach
DISCLAIMER: What you’re about to see is still hypothetical
I’ve got a lot more work to do before I can do this for real
MY APPROACH
(SLIDE) But here’s what I’m working with so far
The focus of the Crosscreek story is a synthesized overview
Like a Wikipedia article, replete with actual links to other pieces of the story, and other related stories
Being actual links, they give you some sense of how stories relate
The latest developments appear as a blog on the story page, so we handle the “what’s new” function
The overview is updated as developments emerge, like a Wikipedia article
As well as welcoming discussion on each of the blog posts, we also invite discussion on the topic itself
One of the main overarching goals is to make it much easier to tell how this story relates to something larger
In this case, Columbia’s planning process and the vision for the city’s future
(SLIDE) The hard part about presenting a project like this is that execution is key
I expect that we’ll get a lot wrong during this go-round
My biggest hope is that we succeed, but if we fail, we fail well
That we learn interesting lessons about how this approach can be refined
CONSEQUENCES
(SLIDE) If we do succeed, here’s what I expect will be some of the outcomes
I’m going to start with the practical and ease on up to the theoretical
(SLIDE) First, by treating stories as topics that evolve over time, we will have created places where stable communities could hypothetically flourish
That’s not all that’s required, of course
Good online communities become likelier if you have
Clear authorities and personalities to guide discussion and set the tone
Good technology that allows for threaded discussions and comment rating
But having communities based around topics makes it at least possible for communities to arise
(SLIDE) This may seem crass, but it’s important: Search engine optimization
In many ways, SEO is just a jargon-y term for making the Web better
Better-organized, more deeply interlinked
This approach should help us arrive at a point where when people Google “Crosscreek Center,” what they see is the Missourian’s synthesis of the subject
(SLIDE) By using two endlessly fluid information formats - wikis and blogs - we will be much more able to adapt to the pace of reality
Twice now the NY Times has written about how Wikipedia seems to function as well for capturing breaking news as it does for synthesizing longer-term information
Whether a story breaks or oozes, we can track it accordingly
(SLIDE) Not every story relates to me, and that’s fine
Different information becomes relevant at different points
Talk about 35W and gusset plates
Sometimes a breaking news event is a hook into a larger story
Or we learn something that makes us interested in a story we’d never considered before
If I’m driving past Stadium and 63 and I wonder, “What’s that thing they’re building?” this approach makes it much likelier that I can easily satisfy my curiosity
(SLIDE) This is one of the most important potential consequences of this approach
If we do this right, when you come to the website we create, you will actually begin to feel *more informed* rather than merely ambiently aware
You’ll have some sense of how to prioritize the information we present
While you can dig as deep as you want, you can also gain a quick understanding of a range of topics
We will have shifted from an info-scarcity model to an info-overload model, and the benefits should be clearly apparent
Finally, the word I’ve refrained from mentioning during this entire talk
(SLIDE) Context.
If we get this right, and again, it’s a big if …
We will constantly be advancing the important, universal stories that justify our work
Stories like, "What type of city is Columbia becoming?"
"How can I help to advance my community?"
"What is most important for me to understand?"
The shift that I’m advocating here is a sort of fundamental reorganization of our mission:
Away from "filling a news hole"
Away from making our audiences ambiently aware
Away, really, from a focus on the latest news
I summarize that re-formed mission this way:
(SLIDE) Don’t
(SLIDE) just
(SLIDE) tell
(SLIDE) MORE
(SLIDE) stories,
(SLIDE) tell
(SLIDE) LARGER stories.
