I agree 100%. With only limited direct experience I would value any thoughts you might have about how I see the problem.

First, teachers do not have the time to do their jobs. Enormous amount of wasted energy and being busy, being busy. The other problem is a process for a path out for teachers who don't get it.

My impression is that almost every teacher knows who is good and who is not so good in the building. I would think a simple on line survey - probably anonymous - would highlight those with problems very quickly. Once identified, the Union could take the lead with either a little help or info. For those few who really shouldn't be teaching, the Union could develop paths to alternative careers. The easiest to me is to help them start their own businesses or get some training edu job in a different sector.

My two cents. The Twitter format of a 140 characters or live blogging at an event is, in my view, the best way to get the facts as they happen. I read the live blogging from one of the President's press conferences at WSJ. Because time was so limited, there was no analysis. Just an amazingly skilled reporter being able to communicate what they saw happening at the moment.

There is just no getting around the truth that after the event, the selection of facts is fraught with implicit judgments and the selections are filtered through personal and socially supported lens. It's why jury trials have such a hard time figuring out the "facts of the case" and why eye witnesses are sometimes the most unreliable. It's also why lawyers spend so much of their time finding and presenting the "facts of the case." And historians do the same. Presenting the facts in a particular order is the "analysis" in the sense of the patterns that create meaning for the reader or viewer or jury.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that events are not amenable to becoming facts. Merely that it is a complex process. I agree with Terry's point about "just the facts, ma'am." I'm just saying that translating facts into useful data points might be exactly the irreducible value of journalism. Everyone is entitled to do "analysis" or "commentary". Some patterns emerging from the data points work for me. Some don't. But that's not the core of the journalist's job.

i agree that the issue is that the article is a broken format. There's been a useful discussion about how the story is the appropriate kernel for the news. But, 'they want the whole story without having to ...." There is no way to tell a complex story in a summary. What you can do in a "summary" is let people know if something might affect them adversely or get them to smile. And give them a portal so they can wade into the stream of information to learn what might have really happened.

I think an interesting data point is the regular news in brief column on the front page of the WSJ. The question that it answers is "Did anything happen that I have to worry about?" That's worth the price of admission. Everything else is a nice to have. I do think that the daily paper has the value of making easily available for a quick glance, "Did anything happen last night that I have to worry about." The value is in the expectation of getting that question answered on paper, every morning. The longer features could be published once a week, or in the form of a paperback book or with links to the website.

Meanwhile, that leaves lots of paper real estate for appropriately priced advertisement, sports, comic strips.

Just had a little time to click through the site. Brilliant. If you have some time to keep us posted on how it works out re engagement, that would be much appreciated.

FYI
http://toughloveforxerox.blogspot.com/2009/05/ver...

Matt,
In case this hasn't gotten on your radar, I think it's a must read..
http://eaves.ca/2009/03/17/journalism-in-an-open-...

Fair enough. But, I think the narrative of many journalist students since then was more about meeting Deep Throat, getting access to just the right source, and "we took down a President." The fact that it is a myth is not a surprise as the other myth is that the media got it mostly right when reporting about the Vietnam War from 1964 to about 1971. In that context Judith Miller is only the most egregious example, not an outlier.

Public record is most usually found in documents. So maybe there is a kind of journalism that can be document based.

I had to laugh when I heard some congressman telling Joe Scarborough that "no one in the House read the stimulus bill" before they voted yes. Then Joe et al were "shocked, shocked!"

Then I asked myself.."Shouldn't that be a journalists job?"

"Find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record." is very specifically not heroic Watergate journalism.