Journalistic nuclear physics

By G.L. | AUSTIN

A LARGE chunk of SXSW is about the future of journalism, and one theme over the past couple of years has been the attempt to blast what is currently the atomic unit of journalism, the article or “story”, into its constituent quarks, and reassemble them as something else.

I've been following this conversation because I think this makes a lot of sense. 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. On a large and complex issue like healthcare reform or Middle East politics, it is extremely hard to understand it well by reading even a large quantity of news, because news is designed to tell you what's new, not to provide a coherent understanding of it. You have to search among hundreds or maybe thousands of articles, each isolated on its own unique page, to find the handful that take a step back and really explain what's going on.

Thus, goes the theory, when none of the constraints of traditional media applies, everything can be different. Yet the basic unit of journalism, in most cases, hasn't changed.

A panel at last year's SXSW, entitled "The Future of Context", examined ways to give more context when you're not limited by the container of the news story. At their most basic these range from simply adding inline links to past stories, as many sites already do, to structuring the journalism around the context instead of around the news (which is what happens on a Wikipedia page about a breaking story), to having a topic page that lists all the articles on a similar subject. Jay Rosen, one of the panelists, who teaches journalism at New York University, is running a class project on creating "explainers", longer-lived pieces that a website can link to from its news stories to provide the context.

Another idea, still in its infancy, is finding ways to tailor the story to the reader by providing different levels of detail. In an ideal world, your web browser, news aggregator or search engine would know how much you already know about the protests in Egypt, and show you only what's new to you. Since our software is not quite that clever yet, the next best thing is to make it easy for the readers themselves to pick how much background they need. Mother Jones made a rough attempt at this with its topic pages for various countries during the recent Arab protests: each page starts out with the absolute basics (eg, "Egypt is a large, mostly Arab, mostly Muslim country"), but you can skip past those to more detail, finally ending up in a blow-by-blow stream of the latest events in chronological order. The pages are frankly too overloaded with information, but by reversing the traditional order of news and context, they make it much easier to get the background on the story, while still relatively easy to get the latest news too.

A session today, “Hacking the News”, took the argument for refashioning journalism a little further. Tristan Harris of Apture (which makes the search toolbar that appears on some of our pages when you scroll down the screen) asked people to imagine how ridiculous it would be if programmers rewrote their all their code every day with minor tweaks. Yet, he pointed out, journalists are constantly writing news stories that have to cover much of of the same ground as older ones. What if there were a way to construct news coverage out of reusable units instead, as programmers use code libraries?

There was more discussion of such ideas on the panel, which I won't go into here (you can read the excellent live-blog by NPR's Matt Thompson); suffice it to say, this is still highly theoretical. But there is a more immediate way to reduce the wasteful recycling. Trei Brundrett of SBNation, a sports website, demonstrated a new version of the "story streams" that the site has been using for a while.

A story stream puts all the updates to an ongoing story (which can run to dozens) on the same page, under the same URL. There is no need to rewrite the context for each one; they just contain the latest news, and you run your eye down the page, reading them in reverse order. However, that can still be quite cumbersome for the reader. So the new version includes a list of the headlines on one side, like the list of emails in your inbox, which shows you which ones you've already read.

Google attempted a crude version of this with its Living Stories site, which listed articles from various newspapers on a topic and faded out those you'd already seen. But because each story still had its own separate URL, the topic page didn't accrue the value (nor, crucially, the search-engine ranking) that comes with having a lot of useful material in one place. Google ended the experiment last year. A story stream, by contrast, is permanent, and up to a point at least, the bigger it grows, the more valuable it gets.

The question is, if these are such good ideas, then why are so few news organisations using them? The answer is that it takes a big cultural shift to get journalists to organise their work and writing along such different lines. A journalist is used to creating a sparing, self-contained portrait of the story as it stands at a moment in time. The ability to do this with elegance is part of the pride of our trade. Posting dozens of short updates or cobbling together coverage from pre-cooked elements, by contrast, feels demeaning. And more to the point, it requires tearing up editorial processes that have been in place for so long that we hardly even realise they exist. According to Mr Brundrett, the hardest part of implementing story streams at SBNation was not building the technology, but convincing the journalists.

For a publication like The Economist the basic unit of journalism is unlikely to change, because it perfectly suits the thing we produce: a once-a-week round-up of the world's main events, tightly edited and closely argued. For long magazine articles, similarly, the elegant, complete package is the whole point of the exercise. For those whose business is 24-hour breaking news, however, I think the nuclear fission of "the story" as we know it is going to be inevitable, and will accelerate as technology becomes better at identifying what readers already know, making an ever-finer customisation possible.

Note: I'm aware that, despite what it says at the top of this page, it is now day three; but not until now have I had time to sit down and write this out.