Reinventing the article

Posted: May 30th, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Notes | Tags: , , , | 3 Comments »

A month ago I wrote about Sean Blanda’s BarCamp NewsInnovation session on reinventing the article. Sean has gone ahead and wrote up his own blog post that should help flesh this debate out further:

Much of the discussion about reinventing media/journalism happens in a frustratingly small spectrum while instead we ought to be reconsidering everything. No really, everything.

Perhaps the biggest reason traditional content creators are being usurped by seemingly unrelated and non-journalistic web services is because the foundation of journalism is broken. In other words: we need to reinvent the article.

What Sean is arguing for is that we need to stop merely tweaking how journalism is done and rethink it from the ground up. Computers and the Internet allow all kinds of journalism that didn’t exist before, especially around structured data. Presenting information in narrative form made sense in the heyday of newspapers, but that time has come to an end.

Crime data is a great example of something that doesn’t make that much sense in narrative form. Focusing on the narrative when reporting on crime leads to people feeling too much and not thinking enough. People are swayed by the visceralness of the reporting, and not the reality of crime in a particular area. This is how you have people claiming that an area is getting less safe when in reality crime is dropping.

And when the general population begins to believe the opposite of reality, bad journalism can often be the source. Good structured crime reporting, however, can better show the reality on the ground and trends over time.

Chicago Crime and its successor EveryBlock showed a better way to handle crime data. Take the data, put it into a database and show it on maps. All of the sudden this gives crime reporting context. Without context, this kind of reporting can lead to invalid conclusions. EveryBlock can even be used as civic tool to help bring about change.

Residents and politicians can easily see crime trouble spots and can use it as a tool to come up with new solutions to tackle problems.

I don’t pretend to have all the answers on how to make journalism more relevant in a digital age, but I do know that too much of our reporting is done in a manner better fitting a different time.

  • ben rooney

    Sure you can have a story about crime data if your aim is to convey data. If your aim is to give voice to people’s concerns, their worries, their fears, to share their common humanity then crime data is but a small part of that story. Tell the story of the victim, tell the story of the criminal, tell the story of the cop.
    If you reduce stories to the underlying data then you are not in the journalism business anymore, you are in the data transfer business.
    What I suggest is that we want option (d), all of the above. We want data as well as narrative.

    • http://twitter.com/pwthornton Patrick Thornton

      I thank you for your thoughtful comment.

      I would agree that we want both the data and information about the crime itself. I would disagree that data is not journalism. Data when structured properly and made accessible to people is journalism. It’s reporting the facts in the most unvarnished form possible.

      News organizations can help make this data more accessible. Government data is often inaccessible and poorly formatted. It’s often not fit for public consumption.

      In addition, journalists can help serve to keep governments honest about the data they are reporting and make sure that data is reported in the first place in formats that can be used and mined for further information.

      I think narrative-only reporting of crime can be dangerous as it focuses too much on people’s fears and not enough on the reality on the ground. I’ve seen this first hand in my community where there was some movement to create a youth curfew because of crime fears, despite the fact that the crime rate is dropping around here. A few high profiles cases were blown out of proportion.

      The reporting around here lacked enough facts to convey the real reality. This doesn’t even need to be in a database. A written article that mentions crime data could have gone a long way to help educate my community and county.

      • benry62

        Thank you for your very prompt reply.

        Journalism has many functions, one of which is to inform, but it must also entertain and engage. You will not inform your readers if you bore them.
        I completely concur that whatever form journalism uses, it must be responsible. Alas it is all too easy to spin a story, to be selective in your facts, to serve a political agenda; we have all seen it done and seen it done far too often.

        I wonder what the role of a modern news organization is with regard to re-formatting data. I like your idea that the media should add data visualization to its list of skills. I have seen some good attempts at this, but like every other organizations, we lack the people with the right skills.

        What the net allows us to do is far more flexibility in how information is presented. In print you have the two or three tools: the infographic, the picture and the narrative. Online you have far more choices. Unfortunately what you tend to lack is the time and the resources to deploy all those tools, but that is another matter.

        However, as an ink-stained old hack (even though I can code) who carries a notebook in his pocket and still does shorthand I am going to fight the corner for the narrative. Long may it last, long may it prosper. Story telling is one of the oldest human activities and the history of technology is the history of ever better methods of story telling. Let us not lose sight of that.