CJR’s “Launch Pad” feature invites new media publishers to blog about their experiences on the news frontier. Past columns by Josh Kalven, founder of Newsbound, can be found here.
If you’re the sole founder of an early-stage startup and you’re beginning to execute your concept, there’s a moment where you actually feel the company growing inside of you. You feel yourself organizing your brainpower into different departments: one cranking out content, one designing a website, one recruiting talent, one courting investors. You feel an incredible push and pull between these competing voices, each calling your attention to their own lengthy to-do list. And you remember that this is why companies ultimately grow: because you can’t do it all alone.
That is all a long way of saying that the department of my brain responsible for writing these “Launch Pad” columns was brutally subdued by its rivals this spring. The good news is that, during the intervening months, I launched a beta site for Newsbound and released a fresh batch of explanatory content—a “stack,” as we call it—pertaining to the federal budget debate in Washington.
I also spent a good deal of time following the debate over the “article” as the traditional mode of delivery in journalism. It all began with Jeff Jarvis’s May 28 blog post titled, “The article as luxury or byproduct.” The gist of Jarvis’s piece (and I hesitate to summarize it, as it’s already been misconstrued or cherry-picked so many times) is that, as the default form, the article is over-used and often cheapened by the online news system. From his follow-up piece published on June 12:
How many articles are rewritten from others’ work just so a paper and a reporter can have a byline? How many predict the obvious (every story about an upcoming storm, holiday, press conference, or horse race election)? How often do you see a local TV story with any real reporting and value instead of just someone standing where the news happened 12 hours ago telling you what you and he both read online already? Too many articles passing themselves off as professional journalism are crap and I say we can’t afford to do that anymore. I say we should treat articles with veneration as a luxury.
I couldn’t agree more. Freed from the constraints of print production, we now have all this space to expand our notions of how news updates are delivered and organized. And yet, when it comes to covering big stories and disseminating the relevant updates, major news outlets still spend most of their time rapidly repeating themselves in article form.
In a dispatch from South By Southwest this year, The Economist noted how “wasteful” this all is:
Today’s journalism is shaped by the technological limitations and business models of the pre-internet era. When you can only publish at certain intervals, when the space available is dictated by constraints like the cost of paper and delivery, when success means getting the news out faster than your rivals, when stories have to be self-contained (ie, you can’t link to yesterday’s newspaper piece or radio segment), and when they have to be the same for every reader (ie, there are no browser cookies or logins or anything to let you tell individual readers apart), you have to create journalism to suit: discrete little packages that contain both the latest news and the context necessary to understanding it, written in such a way that the latest events are always at the top, with minimal context because space is at a premium, yet comprehensible to someone coming to it for the first time.
We are so used to this format we give it no thought, yet it is highly idiosyncratic, limiting and wasteful. Journalists spend enormous effort on repeating the same material with slight tweaks, and readers on wading through it.
After he himself “waded through” our current news system in early 2011, Ben Huh kicked off his Moby Dick project by putting the problem in more succinct terms: “Why are we still consuming news like it’s 1899?”
This conversation excites me immensely because it begins to acknowledge the diversity of news consumption habits.
The incoherence of this article at least does not obscure the giddy excitement that segmenting the "product" of news gathering while mechanizing its production induces in Today's Entrepreneur.
It is all very exciting, I'm sure, for those blessed with "financial backers."
#1 Posted by Edward Ericson Jr., CJR on Wed 29 Jun 2011 at 01:19 PM
That's right, Edward: I do feel giddy about the potential of segmenting the news product as we know it. Not at all ashamed to say it.
My broader thesis is that the journalism industry is excluding millions of potential readers/viewers/users by failing to develop varied formats tailored to all the different news consumption behaviors that exist out there. The audience is not zero-sum. It can be expanded and engaged and informed far beyond the status quo we see today.
It's going to take innovation to get there. And much of that innovation is going to come from entrepreneurs. And many of those entrepreneurs are going to have "financial backers," i.e. investors. So what?
Also: nowhere in this piece, or any of my previous Launch Pad columns, did I voice support for "mechanizing" news production. Not sure where you got that from.
#2 Posted by Josh Kalven, CJR on Wed 29 Jun 2011 at 02:39 PM
Got that from Jarvis, Josh, with whom you "couldn't agree more."
And don't get me wrong, I'm very excited too. My next hedge fund is going to focus on media mustardization strategies.
#3 Posted by Edward Ericson Jr., CJR on Wed 29 Jun 2011 at 05:24 PM
Okay, but where does Jarvis advocate for more mechanization of news gathering? If anything, he's lamenting the over-mechanization of the "article" in the current online news system, in which every new piece of on-the-ground reporting spawns hundreds of quick-and-dirty, valueless rewrites under separate bylines. This is the "cheapening" I refer to.
#4 Posted by Josh Kalven, CJR on Wed 29 Jun 2011 at 07:23 PM
At the risk of being accused of cherry-picking, here's Jarvis: "I’ve been talking with some people about concepts for reorganizing news organizations around digital and I keep calling on John Paton’s goal to keep in the field and maximize the two things that add value — reporting and sales — and to make everything else more efficient through consolidation or outsourcing. As I was talking to someone else about this, it occurred to me that in some — not all — cases, not only editing and packaging but even writing could be done elsewhere, as Postmedia did in its election experiment. I’m not talking about complex stories from beat people who understand topics and need to write what they report from their earned understanding. I’m talking about covering an event or a meeting, for example."
The model he suggests is what was done at TIME and elsewhere: disaggregating the construction of a news story (or "article," if you will) into its component parts. This will help efficiency, he assures us, by allowing reporters (and sales people?) to do what they do best, while leaving the "writing" and editing "outsourced" to, um, other sources.
Not sure how anyone could read this as anything other than out-sourcing; assembly-lining.
Demurring that he's "not talking about complex stories from beat people who understand topics" but instead mundane stuff like "covering a meeting, Jarvis poses as a wide-eyed innocent, or a venture capitalist. Only at the end of the piece did I remember that he knows--or should know--that "beat people who understand topics" are made, in part, by covering meetings.
Of course, cobbling stories (or articles, or mustards, whatever you want to call them) from disaggregated and context-free "facts" sent via reporter's (and others--free others, of course) iphones gives the Head Cobbler the power to frame the narrative free from pesky context in an a way most pleasing to the company's owners, sales people, advertisers etc., as was Henry Luce's practice for decades. This model would make life much easier for publishers and editors, as the "reporters" (now specialized, single-function workers) will have no expectation, professional or otherwise, that the facts they send to rewrite will be placed in anything like the context in which they occurred.
Hence: "the article as a luxury item."
Pardon me, but I Grey Poupon that.
#5 Posted by Edward Ericson Jr, CJR on Wed 29 Jun 2011 at 08:57 PM
Jarvis is musing there and he makes perfectly clear that he's not prescribing a method for the entire universe of newsgathering (just "some" of it). My takeaway from that passage: We need to be more selective and efficient in how we organize and deliver the "infobits" that make up so much of the news stream.
And again, I couldn't agree more with that view.
Let's imagine, for instance, that I'm covering the Illinois General Assembly and the latest "infobit" I need to write about is the guv's pledge to rewrite parts of the budget. Do I really need to write a full article with numerous grafs on the events that led up to this announcement and the particularities of the guv's veto powers? (See example here: goo.gl/k29Gw)
And do I need to write similar full articles, containing much of that same information, again and again, day after day, as additional infobits trickle out of the statehouse? What if instead I wrote a single "uber-article" that provided the context and explanation necessary to understand this ongoing story and then I appended it with paragraph-long updates that communicated the incremental developments? Wouldn't that be a more efficient use of my time as a reporter? And with the right design, couldn't this lessen the user's feeling of being overwhelmed by all these fragments of news?
Well guess what? In the online world, we can reorganize news presentations in just this way. SB Nation is already playing in that sandbox with their Story Stream format (example here: goo.gl/QResb).
What I'm trying to say is that there are ways to simultaneously elevate original reporting and cut back on the wasteful repeating, all while making the news consumer's experience easier. But, to return to my analogy, we've got to be willing to experiment with new "mustards" in order to discover them.
#6 Posted by Josh Kalven, CJR on Thu 30 Jun 2011 at 12:42 AM
I take no issue with that idea. It's a fine idea. It's in use online everywhere. Please refine it, deploy it, practice it. (But, man, if you're gonna do that one-paragraph/tweet-into-story update schtick you better put in a link up top to the "uber story" so people who only half care can get the gist of it. That story stream is total ass for anyone not fully invested in the Grand Drama of The NFL Lockout of The Century).
So, by all means, play with it. Don't try to patent it though. Maybe you invented the word, "infobit." If so, congrats on that, and may you profit handsomely from it.
The idea that the "story" might not be the optimal vehicle for a specific [info]bit of news is not an innovation. USA Today didn't even invent that; there've been bar graphs and "charticles," indexes and annotations since I was a wee content provider.
Also, no one will deny that herd reporting--that tendency of packs to follow some bullshit scandal or trumped-up issue into the weeds of irrelevance--is "inefficient," as is the practice of re-writing three-quarters of the story with each new dispatch.
The trick is to not conflate bad practices with bad systems.
It is my observation and experience that bad journalistic systems are developed and deployed by management, while bad practices are merely tolerated and adapted by those systems, which then perpetuate them. A subtle point, perhaps, but crucial if you mean to dissect the actual craft and business of reporting and then reassemble it in way that's useful to some broad segment of humanity.
It's also where Jarvis errs, and where I think you're following without sufficient investigation. Merely musing or not, Jarvis's "some, not all" caveat would mean nothing in modern corporate practice, if the system were set up--as we know it always must be--to serve the interests of investors first.
I assume you read Dean's Hamster Wheel musings. The idea that what we're all after is infobits would appear to fit well into the larger idea, dominant today, that journalists are just content providers, and that content, like mustard, benefits inevitably from a socio-corporate superstructure akin to modern industrial food processing, with its attendant marketing.
I suggest that the news--not "media content," not "infobits;" news--is less like a condiment than you think it is.
#7 Posted by Edward Ericson Jr., CJR on Thu 30 Jun 2011 at 10:38 AM
But in one of Gladwell's memorable articles he pointed out what happened when ketchup makers tried to go the gourmet mustard route: People didn't want better ketchup; they liked their ketchup the way it was. We have to ask if it's the institution of the article that people don't like, the content of articles, or the delivery system.
#8 Posted by Bill Walker, CJR on Thu 7 Jul 2011 at 07:43 PM
Who is your audience? Basic stuff from decades ago and still the best recipe for your content. You are over thinking all this, it seems to me. As an Oxford don told a former boss of mine when he queried the meaning of a word "If you bear down too hard, your pen will go right through the paper."
Back off lads. Know your audience, or as the Brits have said for years: "Horses for courses."
Nothing new here, just more discrete audiences.
#9 Posted by Michael Reilly, CJR on Mon 11 Jul 2011 at 10:40 AM