We're starting to decorate our office with a few signs/images that are reminders of what we're doing at Pegasus News. We had a gentlemens' agreement with our landlord not to hit them up for renovations to our decidedly as-was space until we were sure we were going to be able to launch our full business. We're moving ahead on that now, and are actually working through construction.
Here's the current state, bare floors and all:
Anyway, other than my longstanding clock scheme (which I'll show off when it is done), the piece of decor I'm most concerned about is a poster reminding us about our fundamental approach to local news. This is a mock, that Laura E will design into something that gets my point across without being an eyesore:
Database [dey-tuh-beys] -verb: to transform pieces of information that are useful for a moment into a network of information that is useful forever.
One of the things I've always believed, and that our TexasGigs traffic patterns confirm, is that "data" is much more critical to news than narrative. I'm not talking about just ones and zeroes here -- our band pages, for instance, are data. They have words, pictures, and in many cases audio. But as data, they naturally intertwine with other data, allowing you to easily see where a band is playing, what the drink specials are that night, what other shows are nearby, and what the opening act sounds like.
That approach is indicative of how we're going to cover sports, politics, crime, shopping, dining, arts, religion and everything else that has to do with living in DFW.
That's not to say that we don't believe in narrative or storytelling. I got into this business because I love storytelling. But, storytelling is really a method of imparting data. The trouble with most storytelling in the news business is that it is done in such a way that does not make it easily or usefully databased. That's because most of our storytelling is for analog media.
Those who have read this blog and its predecessor know that I've followed a lot of the gloom and doom of our business avidly. Over recent months, I've come to a firm philosophy on this: The news business as we know it is only going to continue to contract and weaken unless and until news organizations start treating everything as data rather than stories. Those stories may read the same, but the process is decidedly different. And it is a process that means producing for digital and databased first and then adapting some subset for print.
We're certainly not original in such thoughts. When we were in our fetal stage, we started a conversation with Adrian Holovaty, then of World Online, now of the Washington Post. As a result, we wound up with an amazing content management system that continues to inform our process and philosophy. We're bringing in our own developers to add to it, but it is the foundation that allows us to take a data-centric view.
Today,. Adrian wrote on this topic on his blog. This is a must-read for anyone in the news business. Also, it's a good indicator of the sorts of things we're working on right now, with a Dallas slant. And we think that news service built this way from the ground up, without a thought towards a print product will yield a news site unlike any other anywhere.
Adrian puts it better than I ever could:
Newspapers need to stop the story-centric worldview.
Conditioned by decades of an established style of journalism, newspaper journalists tend to see their primary role thusly:
- Collect information
- Write a newspaper story
The problem here is that, for many types of news and information, newspaper stories don't cut it anymore.
So much of what local journalists collect day-to-day is structured information: the type of information that can be sliced-and-diced, in an automated fashion, by computers. Yet the information gets distilled into a big blob of text -- a newspaper story -- that has no chance of being repurposed.
"Repurposed"?
Let me clarify. I don't mean "Display a newspaper story on a cell phone." I don't mean "Display a newspaper story in RSS." I don't mean "Display a newspaper story on my PDA." Those are fine goals, but they're examples of changing the format, not the information itself. Repurposing and aggregating information is a different story, and it requires the information to be stored atomically -- and in machine-readable format.
For example, say a newspaper has written a story about a local fire. Being able to read that story on a cell phone is fine and dandy. Hooray, technology! But what I really want to be able to do is explore the raw facts of that story, one by one, with layers of attribution, and an infrastructure for comparing the details of the fire -- date, time, place, victims, fire station number, distance from fire department, names and years experience of firemen on the scene, time it took for firemen to arrive -- with the details of previous fires. And subsequent fires, whenever they happen.That's what I mean by structured data: information with attributes that are consistent across a domain. Every fire has those attributes, just as every reported crime has many attributes, just as every college basketball game has many attributes.
Those three examples are obvious candidates for structure, mostly due to ubiquity. People have been slicing and dicing sports stats for years. People have been analyzing crime for years.
But it doesn't stop at those obvious examples. If you take some time to examine what sort of information newspaper journalists collect, the amount of structure will jump at you. If I may take the liberty of giving examples from Web sites I've worked for:
- An obituary is about a person, involves dates and funeral homes.
- A wedding announcement is about a couple, with a wedding date, engagement date, bride hometown, groom hometown and various other happy, flowery pieces of information.
- A birth has parents, a child (or children) and a date.
- A college graduate has a home state, a home town, a degree, a major and graduation year.
- An Onion-style "On the Street" feature has respondents, answers and a publication date.
- A drink special has a day of the week and is offered at a bar.
- The schedule of the U.S. Congress has a day and multiple agenda items.
- A political advertisement has a candidate, a state, a political party, multiple issues, characters, cues, music and more.
- Every Senate, House and Governor race in the U.S. has location, analysis, demographic information, previous election results, campaign-finance information and more.
- Every known detainee at Guantanamo Bay has an approximate age, birthplace, formal charges and more.
But here's the money shot:
In my experience, when I've tried to explain the error of storing everything as a news article, journalists don't immediately understand why it is bad. To them, a publishing system is just a means to an end: getting information out to the public. They want it to be as fast and streamlined as possible to take information batch X and put it on Web site Y. The goal isn't to have clean data -- it's to publish data quickly, with bonus points for a nice user interface.
But the goal for me, a data person focused more on the long term, is to store information in the most valuable format possible. The problem is particularly frustrating to explain because it's not necessarily obvious; if you store everything on your Web site as a news article, the Web site is not necessarily hard to use. Rather, it's a problem of lost opportunity. If all of your information is stored in the same "news article" bucket, you can't easily pull out just the crimes and plot them on a map of the city. You can't easily grab the events to create an event calendar. You end up settling on the least common denominator: a Web site that knows how to display one type of content, a big blob of text. That Web site cannot do the cool things that readers are beginning to expect.
While I've been dancing on the outskirts of such a philosophy for some time, not long after we relaunched TexasGigs, I had what I call my "Matrix moment," where, like that movie's lead character, the scales fell off my eyes and I started seeing everything around me as a stream of data. Now when I read a great Jim Schutze expose, I wonder how it can be turned into a database and how that database might link with another. When I see a news company start a shopping blog, I shake my head at the lost opportunity to make valuable specialized information useful to someone who doesn't want to read in the blog format. When I see a plain-text best-of list I am puzzled.
Now I know that not everyone is a data junkie, which is why narrative remains important. Our readers or users, or whatever you call them now shouldn't even consciously realize our approach to news has changed -- just that they are more engaged with it than ever before.
Frankly, for many of the workflow and technology reasons Adrian covers, I believe that 99% of all traditional media organizations are completely incapable of making such a fundamental shift. That's where the opportunity for new ventures lies. We hope.
Oh, yeah. One other thing for those of you who have been suffering my proto-visionary prose for the past two years:
We'll deliver before the end of the year.
Comments
Blair Lovern Staff
In theory, this major journalistic transition should be fairly easy for old-schoolers. One problem is for many years they have been moving away from being reporters and being in the reporting business. So often they tend to think they are only "writers" or advocates or both, or something else that deserves the label of a vague higher calling. I've had discussions with people who think there is a difference between a good writer and a good reporter. There is no difference. As Hemingway once stated, a good writer IS a good reporter. You need specific information to convey something well. If you stink at gathering specific information you will stink as a writer.
In addition, if you stink at applying specific information to a bigger picture, you will be steamrolled over in this or any other changing environment.
3 years, 2 months ago ( Link to this comment | Suggest removal )
Jay B. Stevens Verified
I look forward to visiting the office soon!
3 years, 2 months ago ( Link to this comment | Suggest removal )
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