"Cut This Story"

Michael Kinsley has this article in the current edition of The Atlantic. He makes the key point in the opening paragraph (as a good journalist should):

ONE REASON SEEKERS of news are abandoning print newspapers for the Internet has nothing directly to do with technology. It’s that newspaper articles are too long. On the Internet, news articles get to the point. Newspaper writing, by contrast, is encrusted with conventions that don’t add to your understanding of the news. Newspaper writers are not to blame. These conventions are traditional, even mandatory.

His primary gripe seems to be described here:

Once upon a time, this unnecessary stuff was considered an advance over dry news reporting: don’t just tell the story; tell the reader what it means. But providing “context,” as it was known, has become an invitation to hype. In this case, it’s the lowest form of hype—it’s horse-race hype—which actually diminishes a story rather than enhancing it. Surely if this event is such a big, big deal—“sweeping” and “defining” its way into our awareness—then its effect on the next election is one of the less important things about it.

He also complains about just plane bad writing, and about flowery additions that provide no information to the reader. In all of this he is of course correct.

I have another gripe. Let me illustrate with paragraphs three, four and five of the lead story from today's Washington Post, on the earthquake in Haiti. I choose this because it is the lead story from a nationally important paper which also happens to be my local paper. William Branigin and Michael D. Shear write:

"People are out in the streets, crying, screaming, shouting," said Karel Zelenka, director of the Catholic Relief Services office in Haiti. "They see the extent of the damage," he said, but could do little to rescue people trapped under rubble because night had fallen.

"There are a lot of collapsed buildings," Zelenka said in a telephone interview from Port-au-Prince. "This will be a major, major disaster."

He reported that poorly constructed shantytowns and other buildings had crumbled in huge clouds of dust. Near the CRS headquarters, a supermarket was "completely razed," he said, and a gasoline station and a church were reduced to rubble. Among the worst-hit areas was the impoverished Carrefour section of Port-au-Prince near the sea.

The writers apparently seek a "pleasing verisimilitude" by quoting a person who is on the scene. Unfortunately, with the electricity off and radios and televisions not working, the person on the scene has very little important information for the Washington or the American reader. In this case, the interviewee was not only a victim of the quake himself but also an official of an agency that would be expected to provide relief services to other victims, and later might be able to provide real information. (The TV coverage, with a huge amount of time to fill, interviewed people who had recently returned from Haiti and people with family members in Haiti -- people who had even less real information to share with the audience.)

Of course when a magnitude 7 earthquake occurs at a shallow depth within a few miles of city center of a city with two and a half million desperately poor people there will be a lot of deaths, a lot of people panicking, and a lot of property damage. Quantitative data would be informative, but of course quantitative information was not available when the edition went to press.

On the Internet, one could read that the quake had happened. One could check on a photo gallery to see for oneself some examples of the damage that had been done. Indeed, one could check Google Videos for film coverage of the earthquake.

So people are reading the newspapers less and using the Internet more! When the American revolution took place two centuries ago, communications were poor and newspapers often published news that was weeks old but which had just arrived locally. News magazines took over the job of publishing news that was days old, but to compete with newspapers had to take a different, more analytic slant. Now, I suggest, newspapers should do the same thing, recognizing that the Internet and broadcast media to provide minute by minute information, and finding a niche in which the newspaper provides more thoughtful and analytical information as to what the news "means". Maybe newspapers should be smaller, not with less news, but with news stories better written, shorter, and focused on what the factual information in the story means.

Knowledge is not only internalized data and information, but understanding. We need to know what the facts and images mean. Information systems need to adapt to changing technology. The newspaper has to adapt not only to the better means that its reporters use to get information and the better technology to disseminate that information, but to the changing competition from other media as they also adopt improved technology.

Knowledge systems go beyond information systems as they focus not only on the communication of information, but on helping users to create knowledge. Knowledge systems too change with the technology, and the role of the newspaper in 21st century knowledge systems will surely be different than it was in 20th century knowledge systems. Lets hope it is better in the sense of helping to impart useful knowledge efficiently, and not simply in the sense of making money for the owners of the media.