I’m going to be blunt, so pardon my French (again): Yes, I’m suggesting we may be completely fucking wrong with the entire system of news. Right now, when a story breaks, it breaks like a wave. Over a period of time, it rises in interest and discussion, peaks and then drops down until the next break comes. We do this over and over again, forcing readers to surf these waves, be they big national stories or be they hyperlocal news breaks, it doesn’t matter. The format is the same: A never ending flow of new information. Nobody questions its validity as a methodology. But it is, in fact, a staple of old media systems.

You hit on the reason I called my blog “Newsless.” Chuck is right. He and I and a host of others have been discussing a fundamental rethinking of how journalism treats context. I hope you join our evangelizing.

By the way, the Adrian Holovaty post you were looking for is probably this one. I'm certain he'd agree with you that narrative formats are irreplaceable for communicating higher-level knowledge about data. In fact, he said as much in that article:

Second, it's important to note I'm not making an all-or-nothing proposition; I'm not saying newspapers should turn completely to vast collections of data, completely abandoning the format of a news article. News articles are great for telling stories, analyzing complex issues and all sorts of other things. An article — a “big blob of text” — is often the best way to explain concepts. The nuances of the English language do not map neatly to machine-manipulatable data sources.

(Digression: Earlier, Adrian mused about embedding data inside narrative news stories. I looked into a similar idea while embarking on my research project, but I've mostly decided it was beyond my scope for this year. Now I'm curious to hear what Adrian thinks about the prospects for ever doing something like it. I imagine, given his current focus, he would say it's a lower-priority vision than making the many existing data sources more accessible.)

In short: you can't hold people's interest if they refuse to allow you to.

There's more kicking around in my brain but it's tough to organize right now without my computer.

He argued that a story about a fire has component parts (location, time, type, response time, monetary damages) that can be used as pivot points to show the relationship to other fires.

I like that idea, but in practice, something like everyblock (which is a practical application of that idea) doesn't always provide a larger context.

I don't necessarily want to know how fires relate to other fires–interesting and enlightening, for sure–but I think the idea could be expanded to how fires might relate to municipal policy.

As noted in my post at http://cpetersia.wordpress.com/2008/12/06/infor... :

The Complete Community Connection would expand the current reliance on packaged stories in both directions – back toward the original elements, offering transparency, and forward toward a summary of local knowledge in a local wiki.

Also, see a great call to “context” at http://www.newsless.org/2008/12/ten-questions-f...

We are working on the same issues, it appears.

Chuck

Take, for example, the pirates off the coast of Somalia. Big news this summer/fall. They're still there, on the pirated Ukrainian ship. But you wouldn't know that unless you were actively still trying to follow that news.

What was once stripped across the front pages of many major news sites, you can only find updates in random sources, most of which aren't the major news sites (if it's there, it's buried so deep, it's useless).

What has surfaced on some sites, though, is that the French this week captured 19 other pirates.

What I'm suggesting brings people back into the original information. If they became disinterested for whatever reason, this gives them a link from something they're currently interested in to something they were once interested in.

It also helps solve the loss of serendipity people feel when they're looking through news sites. Tags only drill inwards, they don't drill back out. It creates a tunnel vision where people can miss other important information they might find interesting.

(Although a media that knows me and feeds my ever-expanding areas of interests…..)