Rebuilding the news

Jeff Jarvis has suggested news providers must come up with new building blocks for news that replace the article.

Jarvis instead would organize news and information around topics and take full advantage of the Web to create spaces that pull together news, history and context, discussion and other contributions by users and experts alike. It’s a promising take on the power of aggregation—a power most news organizations have yet to tap.

Here’s Jarvis:

“I think the new building block of journalism needs to be the topic. I don’t mean that in the context of news site topic pages, which are just catalogues of links built to kiss up to Google SEO. Those are merely collections of articles, and articles are inadequate.

“Instead, I want a page, a site, a thing that is created, curated, edited, and discussed. It’s a blog that treats a topic as an ongoing and cumulative process of learning, digging, correcting, asking, answering. It’s also a wiki that keeps a snapshot of the latest knowledge and background. It’s an aggregator that provides annotated links to experts, coverage, opinion, perspective, source material. It’s a discussion that doesn’t just blather but that tries to accomplish something (an extension of an article like this one that asks what options there are to bailout a bailout). It’s collaborative and distributed and open but organized.

“Think of it as being inside a beat reporter’s head, while also sitting at a table with all the experts who inform that reporter, as everyone there can hear and answer questions asked from the rest of the room—and in front of them all are links to more and ever-better information and understanding.

“This is the way to cover stories and life.”

This is a very smart idea. It’s got great utility and information value. It needn’t rely on sophisticated Web tools. It holds great potential in the realm of local news.

To explore that potential, I have tried to envision an online space devoted to a local news classic—Street Repairs in Your Town. Here’s what the site could include:

-- A searcheable database that shows what streets have been repaved and when, what streets are scheduled to be repaved and when, or what streets are not on any schedule.

-- A map created from the database.

-- A feature that allows users (journalists too) to post comments and upload photos on the state of their neighborhood streets. Bonus points: This material is integrated into the map.

-- A short article (yes, still) that frames the issue, gives key history (say, citizens have voted down the last three street levies and why), and links to the most important resources.

-- Links to recent news articles about the issue on your news site and others.

-- An archive of relevant city resolutions and ordinances and city council and any local board meetings. Bonus points: Organize or tag material for easy search. Perhaps this is a wiki to which all users can contribute links and other footnotes.

-- Featured links to information on Web sites that describe how other localities keep their streets paved.

I’m not a Web producer. But none of this is Web rocket science. Pretty much all of this material could feed the print newspaper. So the “too busy putting out the paper” rationale doesn’t seem to apply. Think about it. A repository for news and understanding that just keeps giving. Bonus points: Transparency helps make the process of street-paving more fair and better understood. That would be journalism.

Of course, street paving may not be a burning issue in your community, but there must be others. Perhaps it’s time for a page on gasoline prices and ways to save gas. Or information how to live on a budget in a tough economy—generic and readily available links combined with local journalistic effort and user discussion?

What do you think of this model? What issues in your community might benefit from this approach and how would you address them? Please share your ideas in the comments.

Weekend reading: Beyond AP

Gahran’s “what if’s” challenge existing models and suggest alternative paths. A taste:

“What if a coalition of news orgs within a state teamed up with talented technologists, database architects, librarians, search optimization experts, ad networks, and maybe even print-on-demand pros to create a new type of news where packaged stories are but one resulting product?

“What if this kind of team built a replicable, open-source, customizable infrastructure that would make it easy for people to track any issue in the state—regardless of the sources of information (such as public utility commissions, local governments, transit organizations, sports leagues, school boards, citizen groups, or even those notoriously tortuous legislative information systems), and regardless of whether their topics of interest would traditionally make it into the paper?

“What if the core of a news org wasn’t only a staff of trained journalists and editors gathering information primarily to produce packaged stories based on just a small fraction of available info? What if librarians and technologists also were on the job, getting as much info as possible into useful, modular, searchable formats that could be easily searched and mixed according to relevance to particular communities, interest groups, or even individuals?

“What if news orgs’ core offering was not a basically one-size-fits-all newspaper, but rather a statewide or regional “relevance window” service that could be tailored to meet the needs of lawyers, businesses, property owners, schools, activists, healthcare providers, parents, teens, etc.? What if news orgs became very, very structured and flexible about how they collect, collate, and distribute information? What if, as a result, citizens, organizations, and communities could easily stay better informed than was ever before possible?”

Here’s the full post, and it’s worth a read.