Verification, context and “slow news”
As news sources proliferate and the methods used to deliver the news become faster and more efficient, twin problems arise. First, when every rumor and unconfirmed report can spread like wildfire almost as soon as it’s generated, how do you figure out what information to trust? And second, if you’re neither able nor inclined to spend every waking moment plugged into a half dozen news streams, how do you stay informed?
Here are four links looking at various aspects of this issue:
Toward a Slow-News Movement
Mediactive | November 8, 2009
In this post, Dan Gillmor proposes augmenting the round-the-clock news cycle with a movement toward “slow news” — news that’s less up-to-the-minute but more verified and trustworthy.
Quote: It comes down to this: The faster the news accelerates, the slower I’m inclined to believe anything I hear – and the harder I look for the coverage that pulls together the most facts with the most clarity about what’s known and what’s speculation.
A short defense of daily publishing
editor.blogspot.com | May 13, 2009
Howard Weaver writes that while the daily news cycle is outdated as a vehicle for reporting facts as they arise, a daily newspaper still has a valuable role to fill if it steps beyond blow-by-blow descriptions of events.
Quote: I’ve been arguing for years that newspapers – yes, printed, daily newspapers – have a good long horizon on the value curve if they shift their focus to the value they already do best: summary, briefings, orientation, authentication. If a printed product did that well, the fact that it’s a once-a-day product would be a strength: a starting point, presumably first thing in the morning, which helped readers orient their day and prepare to parse and interpret all the fact-clotted data that would wash over the ceaselessly for the rest of the day.
The 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get
Newsless.org | August 19, 2009
Matt Thompson writes that although news stories always tell us what just happened, they tend to be less reliable at providing context and meaning.
Quote: As long as the news is structured solely around what just happened, journalists are going to be fighting a rough battle. With a latest-news-only approach, we stoke demand for journalism by trying to snag people’s attention with each new development. There’s another way, one that leads to a more informed and more loyal public, and allows us to do better work.
How do we serve both engaged community members and casual audience members?
Wired Journalists | November 4, 2009
This is a discussion I started the other day on Wired Journalists, dealing with how to best serve the people who aren’t following the news every minute of the day and don’t want to hunt through a dozen different pages to find the basics of what they need to know.
Quote: We’re all news junkies here, so I think we need to remind ourselves once in a while that not everybody is like us. That there are people who will say “Look, I don’t want to have a conversation with the news — I just want to take 10 minutes in the morning and find out what’s going on.”
Stop lamenting — the printed word isn’t going anywhere
In a New York Times column titled “Lament on the Fading Culture of the Printed Word,” Susan Dominus joins the ranks of those bemoaning the state of today’s media landscape:
Over the years, how many people have read Joan Didion’s pointed, moody, celebrated essays and come to New York in the hope of writing some of their own? The path of those would-be writers is patently stubborn, given the tone Ms. Didion strikes in the essay so many name as their favorite, “Goodbye to All That.” It is a famous elegy for the passing of youth, but also a catalog of Manhattan’s enervating clichés, and, implicitly, a rejection of the New York literary scene she inhabited.
I went back and reread the essay the other day because the title, final and nostalgic, has been reverberating through my mind on a regular basis. I hear it, for example, every time I go to a party and run into a writer or editor I admire who has recently been laid off. So many people in the world of book and magazine publishing greet every such piece of news with a flash back to 12 or 20 years ago. Back then, if anyone with a flair for stringing sentences together lost a job, it was a given that he would land quickly on his feet at an online publication or a small publishing house. But now, goodbye to all that. I have the same thought when some 22-year-old wants help placing a 6,000-word article: Goodbye to all that. When old friends and colleagues from the industry meet up at some sort of gathering, we look at each other and laugh and shrug and marvel at the changing landscape. We mourn more seriously in private.
Here’s the thing. I don’t know anything about the New York literary scene, but I’ll tell you this: In small and mid-sized markets around the country, the printed word is alive and well.
Out here, we live in a different reality from the culture Ms. Dominus describes at places like Conde Nast: being encouraged to eat out and put the tab on your expense account; being reimbursed up to $15 for eating lunch at your desk. If you’re used to that kind of atmosphere, which Ms. Dominus accurately describes as “glittering, gluttonous self-indulgence,” then yes — you’ll probably be disappointed when it all comes crashing down.
But is the culture of the printed word fading? I don’t think so.
I have, sitting on my desk, a copy of a local lifestyle magazine we publish. The cover story is an interesting, well-crafted feature by Sue Van Fleet about two Dominican nuns who have built a reputation together as first-class designers of churches and other sacred spaces across the country. Would the topic impress the Manhattan cocktail set? Maybe not. But the care that went into crafting that story demonstrates nothing but reverence for the beauty of language, the nuances of words.
Looking to place that 6,000-word article? Well, if it’s 6,000 words worth of self-indulgence, I wouldn’t bet on your chances. But if that 6,000-word feature is well-written and relevant to a community’s life, you’ll find a market.
And maybe that market won’t be a Conde Nast publication. But it just might be one of the many small publications that cover the nation outside New York — there is a nation outside New York, you know! — and that in some cases are managing, even in a brutally punishing economy, to grow.
I agree with Jacqueline Carney when she writes:
To the wanton greed I say, with relief, “Goodbye to All That.” But unlike Dominus, who concludes that “even the most jaded among our ranks are not ready to say goodbye to all that,” I say I am. and I am ready to welcome the era of the internet that will hopefully put more commercial endeavors on an even plane so that the executives and the foot soldiers are equally rewarded. The essence of cars–transportation–will not disappear; and the essence of literary culture will be just fine. People, by their very nature, crave to tell and read stories, to fantasize, to learn and to opine. So while the paper industry and the bookshelf industry might suffer, the new scene–the internet and the electronic media–will enable literature to thrive on an equal, if not larger, scale and it will be possible to make a living providing it. We just won’t be able to gorge on the pocketbooks of the general public like we used to.
To the folks in those literary circles — please don’t think that the demise of the things you’re used to means the demise of literary culture or the end of valuing the written word. Sure, the future may not be what you’re used to. Maybe you can’t get paid handsomely to spend your evenings kibbitzing about literature over cocktails anymore — but that was never the reality outside of a tiny little circle anyway. The printed word is not dead, and if you spend more time looking at the possibilities of what’s new and less time complaining about what’s been lost, you might find yourself pleasantly surprised.
Mark Luckie on useful pieces of free software
Mark Luckie of 10,000 Words lists free alternatives to these pieces of software: Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Final Cut, Adobe Premiere, Pro Tools, Adobe Audition, Soundslides, Flash and Microsoft Office. Plus, some more suggestions in the comments.
#JournChat on content-sharing agreements
Another bonus to compiling tweets and separating them by question after the fact … it makes it much easier to keep conversational threads together. (Hopefully I didn’t piece any together in the wrong order.)
journchat: Q9 What do you think of the Associated Press Sports Editors’ “sharing” initiative? Good? Bad? More of this? http://bit.ly/2laEau #journchat
#JournChat on advice for smaller newsrooms
I took part in a #journchat session on Twitter for the first time tonight, and with more than 1,000 posts, it got a little chaotic. So, for my own future reference, I’m compiling the elements I found most interesting into blog posts.
This list was compiled using Publish2 and the Link Assist Wordpress plugin (after Greg Linch pointed me in the right direction).
journchat: Q10 What suggestions/advice would you offer to local (i.e. smaller) news outlets who are under-staffed/resourced? #journchat
Confessions of a curmudgeon: Why I used to mock Twitter, and what changed my mind
I admit it — I can be a curmudgeon sometimes.
I’m rarely the first to jump on a technological bandwagon. I didn’t own a CD player until 1995, nor a DVD player until 2002. I didn’t register a Twitter account until June 1, 2009, after one of the school districts I cover started using it to distribute information, and I didn’t make a single post of my own until July 27.
Here are a few of the reasons I dismissed Twitter at first — and a few of the things that changed my mind.
REASONS I DISMISSED IT
1. The name. No, this wasn’t a big factor, but it probably didn’t help that “Twitter” sounds less like a serious communication tool and more like a group of sixth-grade girls giggling in a hallway.
2. The initial concept: that people would use Twitter to answer one question — “What are you doing?”
“Look,” I said. “If what I’m doing right this instant is even remotely interesting, I’m going to be doing it, not ‘tweeting’ about it. Therefore, by definition, anything I ‘tweet’ about will be dull.”
Or, expressed in pictures:
3. Seeing it misused. I think the first time I saw Twitter used in a news context was one afternoon in the newsroom, catching bits of a CNN newscast out of the corner of my eye. Rick Sanchez was covering a plane crash, and underneath the heading “OMG! PLANE CRASH” was a scroll featuring such insightful commentary as “I once twittered from a Bon Jovi concert” and “I once twittered from the shower.”
Rick Sanchez on CNN might be the most egregious offender. As someone always balancing the fine line between being an adventurous news professional and circus geek (”Okay, Taser me!!”), Sanchez has breathlessly turned his daily broadcast into a clearinghouse of meaningless shorthand, from his desk at Twit Central.
“Let’s go to our Facebook page and see what they’re Twittering on MySpace. Here’s what FlannelGuy21 says about our story on Iraqi military strategy- ‘Rick, the Iraqis can’t control their own country.’ Interesting thought, FlannelGuy21. And ChiChiChi in Elko sent this about our story last hour on Octomom – ‘Rick, she needs a lobotomy.’”
… When I’m watching the news, I don’t care what the viewers have to say.
If I wanted to hear what others have to say when I’m watching the news, I’d call up my friend Myles Berkowitz and listen to him yell at his TV screen.
And before anyone gets up in arms thinking that’s elitist – if I sent my own 140-character Twitter comment into a news show, no one should care about my “Tweet” either.
… When I watch a situation comedy, I don’t want it interrupted every few minutes with “Great joke! – CarpetBlogger186″ scrolling by. I expect no less from a newscast.
THINGS THAT CHANGED MY MIND
1. A post from one of my favorite bloggers. In this post from July 27, 2009, Doug Fisher took a writer in the Chronicle of Higher Education to task for complaining that 140 characters isn’t enough to convey more than the bare basics of a story:
Why do we have so much trouble getting our heads around the idea that you use the best tool for the job you need to do? If you want a hole, use a drill, not a screwdriver. Other businesses get it. Why do journalists continue to cling to the idea that all they have is a screwdriver? The problem with that, of course, to continue the metaphor, is that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Thus, to too many journalists, everything has to look like a “story,” instead of acknowledging that much of what they do is not story but factual exposition, and maybe if they stripped those factual expositions down, they’d actually have time to do stories — you know, those things that people really do like to read, with natural, not forced, beginnings, middles and ends, and usually with some kind of complication and resolution that gives insight to the human condition or is just a “good read.”
… And, no, a news article can’t be crafted in 140 characters because it is not a news article! It is a Tweet. Nothing more, nothing less. A basic version of the facts. Stop confounding the two.
In other words: Complaining that a 140-character tweet can’t possibly convey a situation in all of its complexity is like complaining that a photograph can’t do the same thing. Sure, a photo can’t explain the city budget or analyze competing claims in a political campaign. But do you completely dismiss photography as a worthwhile medium because of it?
2. Actually starting to use the service — and realizing what people are doing with it. I haven’t found that many people who tweet about every mundane minute of their lives, and while I’m sure they’re out there … I don’t have to follow them.
I’m pretty selective about who I follow. If I look at someone’s feed and see page after page of tweets about their cornflakes, I’m not going to follow them. As a result, most mornings, I can go to TweetDeck, check everything that’s been posted since the last time I looked, and probably find at least a few links of interest.
3. Getting good story leads. Like this story, which I first read about on the @adrianmaples feed. Or the time a few weeks ago when a fatal accident happened during one of the rare periods when our newsroom is unstaffed, and the only reason I found out about before Monday morning was that I had a TweetDeck search constantly running for the word “Lenawee.”
Hearing about things via Twitter before I hear them through any other medium … for a reporter, that’s a clincher.
Footnotes:
- “News for Twits,” by Robert J. Elisberg. Huffington Post, March 17, 2009.
- “Twitter – angst over ‘is it journalism’,” by Doug Fisher, Common Sense Journalism, July 27, 2009.
(Cross-posted to Wired Journalists.)
The death of narrative? Not really.
From Dan Conover comes a great essay titled “Narrative is dead! Long live narrative!”
In case you haven’t seen it yet, here’s the piece Conover is responding to: a Washington Post story complaining that “in our modern click-and-skim world, there’s dwindling time and space for the expertly crafted narrative.” It’s a lament I’ve heard before, whether from people mocking USA Today for its charts-and-graphics approach to the news, or from people under the impression that Web users are nothing but a bunch of espresso’d-up 14-year-olds with ADHD and the attention spans of gnats.
There are two problems here:
1. The assumption that in order to be serious journalism, a piece must consist of inches upon inches of dense prose.
2. The assumption that inches upon inches of dense prose, even when they’re appropriate (and I do think there are times when they are), can’t grab the attention of today’s reader.
Here’s Conover:
The current mainstream assumption is that we have to dumb down journalism to survive in the digital era. Dave Kindred seems to have reached that conclusion and accepted it in a column that made me want to reach through the screen and shake him. The answer isn’t dumbing down, and Baseball Hall of Fame sportswriters ought to be the first people to understand this.
Did the invention of the box score ruin sportswriting? No? Why not?
Could it be that human beings process different types of information in different ways, with different needs at different times?
… Do you get it now? Today’s revolution isn’t about killing narrative, but about inventing box scores for actions that don’t take place in ballparks.
Narrative isn’t dead. If we see less of it, that’s because we’re finally figuring out that there are times when it’s appropriate and times when it isn’t. And I believe readers will continue taking the time to read long-form narrative — if we’ve proven that we respect their time enough that we won’t ask them to sit through 2,000 words of copy unless it’s really worth it.