Matt Thompson's Comments

Newsless.org : Why we're not creating a wiki

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 20:35:21 +0000

That's my bad, Patung. I had the wrong link in the post. It's DavisWiki.org, and it's very much alive and kicking.

Newsless.org : Eulogy for news voice

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 21:07:56 +0000

Let's say we differ on whether we prefer our journalists to provide "just-the-facts" or analysis, but that's not what I'm disagreeing with you on here, Terry. I'm completely agnostic on whether facts or analysis are wanted, or what constitutes what. My argument in this post is purely about presentation. Whether what we're presenting is primarily factual or analytical, I think presenting it in the stentorian, voice-of-God style that we've grown accustomed to is harmful. The reason that, as you say, the second version I provided above is more "specific and factual" is because it does away with the view-from-nowhere presentational convention that the first attempts to mimic.

Newsless.org : Eulogy for news voice

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 20:08:41 +0000

Part of what I'm saying is that in Henry's case, he's not giving you the facts and helping you decide. He's giving you just as much analysis and interpretation as Cohn is and hiding it behind the veneer of news voice. Only, unlike Cohn, you have less material with which to assess that analysis. You have no idea how Henry came to his conclusions. You have at least some idea how Cohn came to his. But I guess the Cohn/Henry case is askance of my main argument. In brief, I think this sentence...

A senior staffer for a Democratic Senator expressed concerns that Obama's health care reform plan was moving too quickly to accommodate the lengthy bipartisan negotiation process.

... is journalistically and narratively inferior to this one ...

I got an e-mail this afternoon from one of my regular sources, a senior staffer in a Democratic senator's office, saying he worries Obama's quick timeline on health reform is making it hard to bring Republicans on board.

Newsless.org : Eulogy for news voice

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 17:32:10 +0000

I'd disagree, Terry. First of all, you can do stenography journalism in any voice you'd like. Plenty of columnists function as glorified stenographers. Part of what I'm saying is that the convention of institutional voice has made it easier for hackish, stenographic journalism to pass muster alongside real blood-and-grits reporting, since both of them now get mushed into the person-less, "The Star Tribune has learned" style. But the more important part of my argument is the contention that often, when effort is needed to discern what is factual, some analysis or interpretation is required to make that discernment, and it's best to acknowledge that in a transparent, human fashion. I think Atul Gawande's account of sitting down with a group of doctors in McAllen, TX, and probing them about the reasons for the high cost of care in their city was better -- as journalism and as narrative -- than attempting to convey that information in news voice:

I gave the doctors around the table a scenario. A forty-year-old woman comes in with chest pain after a fight with her husband. An EKG is normal. The chest pain goes away. She has no family history of heart disease. What did McAllen doctors do fifteen years ago? Send her home, they said. Maybe get a stress test to confirm that there’s no issue, but even that might be overkill. And today? Today, the cardiologist said, she would get a stress test, an echocardiogram, a mobile Holter monitor, and maybe even a cardiac catheterization.

You could say, "Doctors in McAllen, TX, said patients today are likely to receive a full battery of tests for symptoms that would have gone untested in the past." And you'd have conveyed much less, less effectively. I guess a simpler way of expressing this is that "accurate, clear and complete descriptions of what's going on" often require a sense of the reporter's process and perspective that news voice can only obscure. Take this graf from a less-than-helpful recent NYTimes story:

Democrats in Congress have grown increasingly nervous about the cost of health-care reform, estimated at $1 trillion over ten years. They also have expressed concerns that they would not be able to deliver a bill to Mr. Obama by August without rolling over issues raised by Republicans and ending the appearance of bipartisan legislation on a major policy issue.

Plenty of analysis and interpretation underpins this graf, and packing it all behind this "New York Times has learned" veneer only raises more questions than it answers. Why does reporter Derrick Henry think Democrats in Congress have grown increasingly nervous about the costs of reform? Does he think they were formerly cavalier about the cost of reform? Are there really people in Congress who thought we could overturn the health care system on the cheap? Grafs like that no longer tell me anything. I'm unwilling to trust Mr. Henry's conclusions merely because they've been given the Times' imprimatur. Unleash him to tell me what lies behind his perceptions, and you'd probably be left with a clearer, more accurate, more complete report. Contrast this with Jon Cohn's perspective:

Obama had started the week by pushing Congress to get legislation done before its August recess. But several members of his party responded by saying, in some cases publicly, that Congress would need more time. Obama also spent the week saying, as he has all along, that health care reform must succeed in reducing the cost of medical care over the long run. But on Thursday, the head of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) testified that the legislation he’d seen so far wasn’t fulfilling that goal, prompting some more conservative Democrats to make public their own concerns along those lines. The legislative process is like this--lots of ups and downs, often in rapid succession. Obama is right that we all get too caught up in the 24-hour news cycle. And in a quick canvassing of sources on Capitol Hill over the weekend, the responses weren’t as glum as I’d expected. “We will get there,” one senior staffer e-mailed me. “Always darkest just before a breakthrough.”

I have at least a sense of why Jonathan Cohn came to his conclusions. I know at least what he observed (Obama's speech, the push-back by members of Congress, the e-mail responses from his buddies on Capitol Hill) and how he perceives it. As far as I can tell, he did at least as much "reporting" as Derrick Henry (whose principal facts are quotes from the Sunday talk shows). Cohn's post equips me with the tools I need to evaluate it. Henry's, stunted by the adherence to news voice, does not.

Newsless.org : Eulogy for news voice

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 15:34:08 +0000

Ooh, that's an interesting broadening of the lens, Tim. You're probably right - the weaknesses of the institutional voice convention are probably starting to pop up everywhere, not just in journalism.

Newsless.org : The newsroom: where alternate workflows go to die

Wed, 8 Apr 2009 15:46:24 +0000

Don't worry, Howard, I didn't entirely forget to do some reporting. ☺ Before I wrote this post, I sent an e-mail to Mike Lupo, managing editor for News & Information at the AJC, to ask how it's going. I'll certainly let you know what I hear.

Newsless.org : Does following the news work?

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 00:02:05 +0000

Thanks for the comment, Bill. My reply got so long I had to make it its own post.

Newsless.org : Does following the news work?

Fri, 23 Jan 2009 23:29:06 +0000

I'd argue that I actually picked up a lot more reading these stories end-to-end than I would have otherwise. I was able to remember bits of earlier stories that the editors and reporters assembling this coverage had clearly forgotten all about. I'm convinced that if I'd been following these stories in real-time, I'd have even less of a clue what was really going on.

One thing that I might not have made clear is that I actually retained a lot doing it this way. I really do feel like it gave me a quasi-encyclopedic sense of obscure ordinances and minor City Council skirmishes. If I'd taken a drip-by-drip approach, it's not as though the blind alleys and dead ends I found would miraculously go away.

Plus, it's 366 pages, with a pretty manageable cast of characters. That's a sub-average novel. By this logic, the best way to read Pride and Prejudice would be the DailyLit approach. Which certainly has advantages, but I'm not sure better info retention is one of them.

Newsless.org : The role of print

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 01:56:03 +0000

Thanks for the clarification and addendum, Joel. ... message transmitted wirelessly through the cyberwebosphere.
From: IntenseDebate Notifications

Newsless.org : Inverting the business model question

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 20:19:54 +0000

I'm watching your experiment with great interest, Chuck.

Newsless.org : Inverting the business model question

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 20:18:16 +0000

Thanks for the comment, Robert. I think your post on Metaprinter illustrates what I mean. We all agree on several basics: * Newspapers were very lucrative for quite a while there. * Newspapers are expensive to run. * Editorial payroll composes a fraction of that expense. * Online advertising revenues per visitor provide a miniscule sum compared to print advertising revenues per subscriber. * "Unique visitors" are really nothing like "print subscribers." Given those basics, it's very difficult to take a newspaper's massive P&L and imagine how you scale it down to an online operation. My point is that I think it makes more sense to build the business plan for an online operation (or a network of online operations) from the ground up, rather than attempting to map online revenues to a deconstructed newspaper P&L. This might mean you'd examine each of the beats/topics/niches the operation would strive to cover, and you'd ask questions like, "How big or how engaged of an audience might we need to support coverage on this beat? What funding models might we use to support it?" It might become apparent from a perusal of the posts here that I'm not exactly bullish on general-interest news myself. I think the value online will be found primarily in the niches -- i.e. devoted communities on specific topics. I think the sustainable news operation of tomorrow will involve a network of these communities.

Newsless.org : Does following the news work?

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 18:10:06 +0000

Exactly.

Newsless.org : Does following the news work?

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 18:08:59 +0000

Exactly right, Ryan. One of the more obscure concepts I hope to demonstrate in this little experiment here in Missouri is that producing our information in a more wiki-like format might help us overcome the continuity problems you describe. The Missourian is a great test bed for that. Reporters at the Missourian are students, so there's an unbelievable amount of turnover in the reporting corps, and very few opportunities to build up the kind of institutional knowledge that a longtime beat reporter will accumulate. Among the many goals of my project is to turn that institutional knowledge -- that intellectual capital -- into real, tangible information for the public. Not only do I think that will help the public understand these issues much better, but I think it will help reporters and editors understand them better as well.

Newsless.org : Does following the news work?

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 18:01:31 +0000

I also think that national and international stories generally benefit from the massive fog of news outlets and commentators covering them. Between the Times and the Post and the Guardian and the Economist and the New Yorker and Newsweek and Talking Points Memo and James Fallows, much of the context of a national event is going to be dissected and analyzed. Local stories often only appear in one place, especially the nitty-gritty civic stories I'm talking about here. That's one big reason I endorse Ryan Sholin's open letter to the blogosphere so strongly.

Newsless.org : Does following the news work?

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 17:56:29 +0000

Michael, that's a wonderfully succinct way of stating what I just replied to Kristin below. :) I should have credited you.

Newsless.org : Does following the news work?

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 17:54:28 +0000

Excellent comment, Kristin. And yes, you wrote a very helpful Q&A on a series of road-financing propositions back in October of '05. In that report, you included a wonderful contextual detail -- "Lee's Summit Development Coordinator Ron Cox said developers there fiercely opposed the excise tax initially, but the city has seen no decline in development since it was enacted." Part of the argument I'm trying to make is that this fee increase was in many ways a volley in a larger skirmish between developers and this group of residents (of course you remember the Smart Growth Coalition, and its nephew TARRIF). Reading the coverage, though, it feels as though this fee increase is the entire conflict. There's a larger, ongoing story there that's under-attended. This issue has a past and a future that's not reflected in the coverage, leaving me to have to draw those connections myself. In the model I'm trying to execute, a couple years after Proposition 6 passed, we'd call up our Planning and Development Department (just the way you called up Lee's Summit's) and ask, "As best as you can tell, what effect have those fees had on development?" And we'd include the answer as a data point in that ongoing story. I agree wholeheartedly that "simply tracking the past won't take into account the panoply of current-day factors." What I'm endorsing is covering the present as a waypoint towards the future. Keeping our eye on where present events are situated in a larger context. OK, the development fee increase passed. What does that mean? I don't necessarily think this entails a greater commitment of resources. I think it requires a shift in focus, away from articles and towards stories.

Newsless.org : "Newsless"?

Wed, 7 Jan 2009 23:26:03 +0000

I think there are strong possibilities for print, especially in this transitional period. I think the Politico's model is interesting - most of its audience is on the Web, but most of its money comes from advertising in its free, highly-targeted print edition. I don't know how much experimenting has been done on producing regular print editions for news junkies in a variety of topical/geographical niches. It's something I'd be very curious to try.