Local news in the atomic age
Structured journalism is dramatically revising the first draft of history
By David Cohea
It’s a tantalizing thought: All that work you put into your last well-researched article — about the qualifications of candidates running for office, say — becomes part of a wider stream of reporting you can keep returning to again and again. Instead of filing it away to the dustbin known as the “first draft of history,” it adds to a living process of reporting. The first draft becomes the second becomes the fifth becomes the fortieth: What you and your readers get is a much broader, more comprehensive, deep and panoramic view of local news.
This should be good news for publishers. Just as Facebook Instant Articles and Apple News begins to sweep a news site’s coverage into the flood of everyone’s news articles, your own stream is now has the chance to become something much more unique, substantial and engaging.
These observations come from Alexis Lloyd of NYLabs, the R&D arm of the New York Times. In a post titled, “The Future of News is Not An Article,” Lloyd issues a bald statement: “… Both Facebook and Apple, who arguable have a huge amount of power to shape what the future of news looks like, have chosen to focus on a future that takes the shape of an article.”
He explains:
News has historically been represented (and read) as a series of articles that report on events as they occur because it was the only way to publish news. The constraints of print media meant that a newspaper was published, at most, twice a day and that once an article was published, it was unalterable. While news organizations have adapted to new media through the creative use of interactivity, video, and audio, even the most innovative formats are still conceived of as dispatches: items that get published once and don’t evolve or accumulate knowledge over time. Any sense of temporality is still closely tied to the rhythms of print.
Creating news for the current and future media landscape means considering the time scales of our reporting in much more innovative ways. Information should accumulate upon itself; documents should have ways of reacting to new reporting or information; and we should consider the consumption behavior of our users as one that takes place at all cadences, not simply as a daily update.
It’s now possible to encode information in a posting environment so that that its searchable and extractable, allowing news organizations to leverage “the depth of knowledge from a rich body of reporting to extend and deepen news experiences.”
Those incremental bits of annotated and tagging information he calls Particles — “… granular metadata (which) could be created through collaborative systems that rely heavily on machine learning but allow for editorial input.”
By making the knowledge accumulated for an article accessible for future use, the tools of newsgathering will be greatly enhanced, allowing for a framework for deep reading and much more substantial understanding.
The result is structured journalism — a radical change in the way content is created so that as much of the information can be saved for subsequent use.
Articles would have far more elaborate structure for combining with other articles or creating new ones, allowing for a much more powerful retrieval than current archival methods (where they exist at all). Articles could then be adapted far more flexibly to various platforms, farming it out in one manner to read on a website, in another abbreviated form for a smartphone app or even a one-sentence story on Apple Watch.
Best of all, structured journalism could erase the old distinction between ephemeral and evergreen content which print journalism established. By identifying elements that have a long shelf-life at the beginning of digital creation, they can readily be reused in new contexts. “It means that news organizations are not just creating ‘the first draft of history,’: Lloyd writes, “but are synthesizing the second draft at the same time, becoming a resources for knowledge and civic understanding in new and powerful ways.”
Having such resources also allows journalists to take a more flexible approach to their newsgathering, creating content that is modular and accumulates over time. Not only does this allow for more flexible distribution, it also gives far more points of entry for reader.
An experimental program at The Washington Post called Knowledge Map constructs many layers of knowledge into an article. Annotated text when clicked open provides graphics, summaries and other supplemental material. It reads like a normal article but has many depths enclosed. (For an example, see “Why the Islamic State leaves tech companies torn between free speech and security”).
Circa, the mobile-first news app that shut down earlier this year, offered “atomized news” — facts, quotes and news updates that fed continuously into developing storylines. Readers caught up on them like a Twitter feed. (See Columbia Journalism Review, “Structured journalism’ offers readers a different kind of story experience.”) The startup failed earlier this year — not enough monetization potential — but it was extraordinarily influential in getting news organizations to think in different ways about the mobile experience.
Journalists are now thinking of story development with these tools in hand. An interesting session a few years back at the Online News Association conference (related by the American Press Institute) had participants brainstorm ways to tell news stories without writing an article. Small groups were assigned a story scenario — how to cover a shooting incident in real-time, for example, or break down a complex story on government.
They examined problems the audience would have with the material, considered storytelling options (video, data visualizations, interactive graphics, etc.) and assessed relevant journalism goals (such as delivering analysis and context to the storytelling). Then they were asked to design a news product that solved the problems and fit the goals.
One group looked at an audience problem: how to get government reporting to connect better with readers’ lives? Solution: use a Instagram or Vine hashtag to pool community reports on what’s wrong or needs to be fixed in the city. Another group approached the complexity of climate change by creating a game where users choose to play as an alarmist or cautious. Where would they build a home, given the effects of storms and high tides, changes in the tourism economy and food prices?
What’s exciting is to think how this new form of reporting will allow us to see a dramatic evolution from the print article of the past. By aggregating knowledge about a locality or beat, a growing, three-dimensional living continuum can develop. How much will our sense of history change at the point, I wonder.
Sadly, there isn’t a people component to this good news. Tribune Publishing announced that several hundred employees had accepted buyout offers for the end of the year. That means that while the publishing giant maybe become more nimble financially, it will have lost thousands of years of local news reporting experience. Without those experienced eyes, how will read the emerging particles of eternity?
