Journalism is Burning Or How Breaking News is Broken
On a day when Alan Mutter told us at Radar about his blog post on the ten-year low for ad sales in print newspapers,
I had the thought that most of a newspaper is a waste of print. Much of it goes unread and all of it is thrown away. Maybe the shrinking of newspapers is a good thing, and I say that with a lot of love and respect for newspapers.
I had those ideas in my head when I came upon a completely unrelated story by Scott Beale on the early early and unexpected burning of Burning Man.
It wasn't the subject of Scott's story that stood out; it was the way he was telling it on his LaughingSquid blog. He reported the story by updating the blog over time. The practice is not unusual for bloggers. Revising or appending an update after the main or original story is fairly common. However, as this particular story grew and grew, Scott decided to keep adding more and more updates to the same blog post instead of creating new and separate posts each day. As of late today, he had twenty-four updates, each one adding some new piece of information to the story or linking to others and it was playing out elsewhere. The last update I read was a link to a Jimmy Kimmel segment where he's making fun of the story.
Having been on the road, I had not read much about the Burning Man story until I read Scott's story. Scott does a great job covering the story (and he doesn't cloud it with opinion.) This story on Scot's blog had a real beginning and I could follow it, having the sense of how it developed. I was able to catch up on what I missed and it was satisfying. If this story had been covered in today's newspaper, much of the detail would have been collapsed and summarized -- and that summary, if I want it, I'll be able to find in Wikipedia. While a newspaper is unable to give me a choice between a chronological view and a summary, the Web could.
Scott's story hints at a better way to tell a news story, better than traditional methods practiced by or imposed upon journalists. What's increasingly difficult to tell, in print or other news media, is the difference between what is new and what is being used to fill up the paper or the hour-long newscast. As a reader, I care about how I fill up my time and use my attention and I know that print and TV waste it. If I'm watching a breaking news story on CNN, they repeat the story over and over again, and then go out into the field to talk to people who have no new news to report. You have to endure all of that in hopes that they will eventually uncover something new to report. I have often wished I could turn the TV set off and let CNN notify me when the breaking news story actually comes with news to break.
When I pick up the paper, I don't know if or how today's story picks up from yesterday or the day before. I know the journalist can't assume that people are familiar with the story and have been following it for days so the story must be repeated. Also, on larger stories like the Iraq war, I get lost, seeing similar stories day after day without much sense of what's exactly changing. It's hard to see a beginning, middle or most dire, the end. I end up reading feature stories that promise to be original, self-contained and complete.
I wonder if anybody is thinking that there might be a better way to organize a story using the tools of the Internet, creating a timeline view of the news. What if each news story had its own "blog" and the developments were added as they occurred? A reader could choose to see the story from the beginning or start where you last checked the story. What if an RSS reader understood the structure of stories with updates and allowed you to expand and collapse a news story like a timeline? What if I could subscribe to stories I wanted to follow and just get updates?
While a timeline view of stories could be automated, I think the best results would come with a journalist using a tool to create the story. I use Google News but I don't find it a satisfying replacement for a newspaper. While it is easier to scan than a newspaper or a newspaper's daily index, Google is not particularly good at identifying the best story or the story with the right amount of news in it. In its own way, it fills up space, telling you how many stories they are, not which ones have new information. And that's the key, the reader/viewer wants to know when there's news, and not because the newspaper or TV needs to say it has news. I believe you need someone to make a judgement on what's news.
I imagine someone's working on a kind of wikipedia for news as it happens. I can think of some interesting ways to visualize a front-page for a news site that ranks and highlights stories with breaking news. The reader might be able to go back in time and join a story that's now a week old. It's a reverse Reuters, which, instead of pushing the same story of a single event to many channels, it organizes the flow of multiple stories of events coming from many, different sources. However, I want an editor or reporter sorting through that flow and organizing the story for me, much as Scott did.
Have you seen anything like this? Surely some "new media" lab must be working on this thing already.
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Great post, Dale. Your point about TV (and radio) news especially is right on, and shows an area that's ripe for disruption from the internet. The endless nattering repeats of the same story have got to go! We hear all the time about internet personalization, but this is one area where it's underutilized. Notice what I've already heard, and don't repeat it, but figure out how to give me updates.
Lots of potential for new media entrepreneurs here.
Dale, so much of this post rang true for me. Your frustrations are universal, and I hope someone takes your ideas and run with them.
On a technical note, Scott's URL is missing the h in the http://
thanks much
While TV news is certainly a waste of time, I disagree when it comes to print. A newspaper is a researched, edited summary of the days news; sure it comes out a day late, but do I need to know about the man burning as it happens? No.
I find blogs much more time consuming; there are so many to check, as much if not more repetition than CNN as each blog repeats a story they saw elsewhere, and a mix of fact, fiction and opinion that can be hard to decipher.
So yes, there is potential to improve. Maybe I would pay for a service that filtered all the news out there on the net for me. Actually I already do pay for a service that does that, prints it out and leaves it on my doorstep at 5am every morning.
But it seems I'm in a shrinking minority of those who don't feel a need to know about everything as soon as it happens.
When I go to research a news story, I usually see a collection of articles, some written when the story broke, some filling in details as they became known. Sometimes information in subsequent articles will supersede information in earlier articles, but how do you tell when this is the case? I would like to see one meta-article that tells that story as it is currently known. This article would have to be revised as new information becomes available and wouldn't work for very general subjects, such as the Iraq war.
I would also like to see more 'back-end' information made available. The news stories we read are actually summaries - why can't we see the things that are being summarized? Reporter's notes, interview transcripts, police reports - that kind of thing. Writing an article makes sense in the newspaper world where column-inches are valuable. On the Internet, space is infinite. Use it.
When I go to research a news story, I usually see a collection of articles, some written when the story broke, some filling in details as they became known. Sometimes information in subsequent articles will supersede information in earlier articles, but how do you tell when this is the case? I would like to see one meta-article that tells that story as it is currently known. This article would have to be revised as new information becomes available and wouldn't work for very general subjects, such as the Iraq war.
I would also like to see more 'back-end' information made available. The news stories we read are actually summaries - why can't we see the things that are being summarized? Reporter's notes, interview transcripts, police reports - that kind of thing. Writing an article makes sense in the newspaper world where column-inches are valuable. On the Internet, space is infinite. Use it.
umm, was this post written in 2001? did you just discover blogs? do you think most people really want news like you do?
you are so wrong in both how news is currently reported, how little journalism is actually committed by citizen bloggers, and how people actually get their news, it's not easy to know where to start.
really interesting concepts dale... cool stuff :)
i thought ted shelton was working on a tool for people to compile / edit called "the Personal Bee"? wasn't it acquired by Technorati?
Dale, I was surprised as I read this post as it is exactly what I have been thinking about for the last couple of months. My vision is of a news site with deep story line categorization, where large stories are broken down into story lines. The story lines are given their own pages and assigned to editors. The editors write and update summaries for the story lines and use tools such as timelines to better the readers understanding of how a story has progressed and where it is heading. Timelines would be only one of many tools at an editor's disposal. The ability to pull in background information would be another (the usatoday and nytimes do this on some stories already, but not consistently and to the degree that is possible). There is so much that could be done beyond what is currently being done.
www.wikinews.org is going in that direction ? You can track a news, its evolution over time and there is the opinion page for contributing back your feeling or see update indirectly. The RSS part has described in your post is not available but could be an interesting option for publishing diff-like from the news story and its evolution.
I'll add another cheer for Dale's thought. I have a criticism/idea to share with the audience of this blog especially:
I think it is a mistake to prematurely focus on news consumption. If there can be a breakthrough here, my guess is that will start with new tools for news production. Here:
Think of a news room in 1972. The movies/books (e.g., "all the President's men" or the pieces about the zodiac killer) are said to be (e.g,. by Jon Carrol of the SF Chron) something like "not entirely fictional" (my praphrase). So, the news room has elements like:
- an archive of "facts" -- from simple things like how somebody's name is spelled to saved interviews
- an archive of past issues
- an "investment budget" managed by editors, spent on investigations
- a chaotic mess of the notes of individual reporters -- notebooks, scraps of paper, thoughts in the back of the mind, etc.
- a production pipeline for copy -- word processor, to editors desk, to print
In that tradition, consumers only ever see the final copy. The value of that copy originates in the official archives and in the reporters notes, but consumers only ever see that final copy.
Dale is describing a consumer instinct/demand to read news in a non-linear way. Reading copy, sure, but being able to drill down into any given detail or zoom back for a bigger picture. The ad hoc mix of Wikipedia plus some reporter blogs gives a tantalizing taste of what that might look like -- but it isn't the same thing. The Chron's news staff isn't about to start using Wikipedia to keep their archives, for example.
In the 60s and 70s, computer assisted typesetting and electronic pipelines for turning copy into pages radically changed the way news rooms worked. It's time, now (well, really, a few years overdue) for the next big beakthrough. Maybe it's even as simple as just installing Mediawiki and a few scripts to bridge it to parts of existing systems, or maybe something more tailor-made for reporting is called for. (I would guess the latter.)
Monetizing it? Ads, sure, but also more expensive paid subscriptions. For example, I might pay more for a print subscription if it included free registration to an electronic news-letter that gathers "headlines" (linking into the archives) about those issues that are important to my immediate neighborhood, or to someone in my profession, etc.
I think it will be very hard to build a system that reporters, editors, and archivists can quickly and easily learn to use, and that they'll want to use, and that today's papers can afford to deploy. It's an interesting challenge.
-t
Those reporters notes, contacts etc. are valuable IP - they are what potentially gives one news organisation the edge over another. They're also valuable to the reporters themselves as a measure of their worth to their employer (or other potential employers). I think it'll need more than some online ad revenue to open that up.
Ciaran:
I agree that the IP (reporters trade secrets, to be specific) is key. I'm not suggesting opening that up. Rather:
Some of the work-product of reporters is simply a network of checked facts, with a thematic selection of topics. Some of that is trade secrets and some of it isn't.
I think the hard part is inventing on-line services for reporters that make it efficient (and rewarding to the reporters) to capture that content.
"Online ad revenue" isn't, by and by, going to be enough to pay for much of anything. It's too easy to produce and distribute on-line ads, consumers are exposed to too many of them -- that market is mid-bubble. That's another story, though.
Right now, the Chron gets basically $4/week from me (newstand price). Other papers a few bucks per year depending on their headlines. For a good on-line service (with reasonable licensing of content so I can quote extensively) I could see doubling that. If the IT for producing such a service is non-disruptive to internal operations and not too expensive to deploy, and if I'm on-average among cutomers, that replaces something like 1/4-1/2 of advertising revenue right there. A rich service like this would have a long tail of easy applications -- more money there. Ads aren't going to completely disappear.
Even within advertising, better IT would be a win. For example, the advertising category of real estate ads took a nose dive and, of course, today's realtors really closely hold their ads but newspapers could help route around that. I like the personality pieces in the Chron's business section, and the technology reviews, and the stock advice -- but how about an on-line market report of real time information about all properties advertised for sale in a given region? I'll bet realtors would buy ads on that service, especially ads with links to the agents for properties listed there.
Newspapers seem to have a largely curmudgeonly culture. That's often a virtue but they've missed a ton of easy on-line plays over the past 5-10 years. (And, when they do make plays, the web sites tend to be -- sorry, but -- not especially good compared to analogous IT in other industries. No offense to the IT professionals, there, but the papers haven't spent enough, carefully enough, in this area.)
-t
Ciaran: think outside the box a bit. It's not necessarily about breaking news, it's more about context and completeness. Some topics a reader knows well (so the latest news is fine) vs. others very little (so additional background is helpful). Or, what if a reader missed yesterday's paper, or the coverage last week because they were on vacation?
And, that assumes subscribing to a publication and reading it regularly, which is already on the down trend. There is so much news about such a variety of topics that assumptions about what the reader already knows are increasingly difficult.
[an aside to the webmaster / sysadmin: the preview doesn't show line breaks, so I added br tags ... which yields extra line break! ooops.]
Maybe if you put a kind of breadcrumb trail (which includes the structure of the actual post's updates) on the top of the post, it would help. What do you think?
Wikipedia actually does a reasonable job of this on breaking news stories. Editors select from various sources, synthesize and summarize while still linking off to other sources.
Take a look at the entry for the 35W bridge collapse.
There are more than 150 sources cited, plenty of pictures and ongoing edits as new information comes to light.
You can even "Watch" the page to get notified whenever changes are made. Now there needs to be a way to only "Watch" on really significant changes, but the tools are mostly there.
The MSM media, for the most part, choose to treat their product like the dead tree edition. Do the story once and it's done.
I went back and looked at some especially egregious cases of Times reporters Jayson Blair and Judith Miller. Despite the Times having later expressed serious concerns about the gist of early reporting of the Iraq war, those stories have no such annotation.
I know I'm working on something in this area, but with a load of other features you've not thought about yet. :-)
I've been thinking about these issues for at least 2 years now, and in the last 6 months have started talking to journalist friends about my conclusions and showing them software I've coded up - they seem to think it has legs, but it'll be hard to bootstrap.
I also know of at *least* half a dozen other guys out there working on separate projects in a similar vein (some of them with backing of MSM outlets), specifically related to UGC and hyperlocal content - the more you think about those issues and how they relate to user experience and what audience expects from a news site, the more issues you find. It's hard, and right now we're all playing for first mover advantage and keeping cards close to our chests. It'll open up soon though as we start to launch.
Regardless, I think by year-end you can see at least 3-4 of those projects launch (I know mine is rolling out in beta this month), and by this time next year you'll see some major shake-ups in online journalism.
I'm probably a little late to the party on this post, but have any of you (meaning the previous commenters as well as other interested parties) thought about entering the Knight News Challege (www.newschallenge.org)?
It's a contest that offers $5 million for digital media ideas that fosters community, and the point is to spur innovation and news using digital media. To quote from the contest site, "we’re looking for smart, innovative solutions that connect people with the news and information that matters to them most." It's open to anyone in the world.
I have a feeling that the commenters and readers might have some unique ideas - and hey, it's worth a shot - according to the foundation's spokesman Marc Fest - "last year only 200 applications ended up meeting all contest requirements and being innovative at the same time." It's well worth reading the rules, because, according to Fest, 26 of last year's 200 finalists won more than $12 million. Statistically, that translates into an extraordinary winning chance for entrants (also taken from the contest's site).
Dale is describing a consumer instinct/demand to read news in a non-linear way. Reading copy, sure, but being able to drill down into any given detail or zoom back for a bigger picture.
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Anonymous [09.01.07 05:54 AM]
It doesn't have a timeline view (and hasn't yet focused on breaking news topics), but this is basically the idea behind Assignment Zero: http://zero.newassignment.net/getinvolved
Here's an excerpt of how it works: "To get the project started, Assignment Zero editors have identified some relevant topics and broken them down into assignments - like an interview, research, or writing a piece. ... Once you've picked out the work you'd like to do, simply visit the assignment's reporting page by clicking on the assignment. The reporting page is your temporary workspace. There you'll find everything you need, including a way to save your draft or file your reporting; a collection of others' reporting; the option to check in with the editor; and a discussion thread about the assignment."