I’ve noticed, as I’m sure you have, whenever a topic of international interest comes up, bloggers, twitterers, people from all over throw their opinions into the matter, share information and follow the topic intently. And then after a matter of days or even hours…nothing. After the initial cause célèbre peters out, we move onto the next shiny object.

Consider the following recent soupes du jour (to borrow another French phrase):

• The Iraq War
• Darfur
• Myanmar
• Mumbai
• South Ossetia

All of these had a tremendous spike in interest and then quickly died out. Why? Do the consequences of each event become less important through the passage of a short time? I’d posit they don’t. What happens, as we know through recent research (read this excellent CJR article for more), is that people reach information fatigue fairly quickly. As such, a river of news may not be the best approach to sustain attention.

In college, I studied American Studies, which is less the study of America, as you’d suspect, and more the study of cultural connectivity. “Connectivity Studies” doesn’t pass the academic naming litmus, I assume. Anyway, nature abhors a vacuum. For example, fog is created by cool air over warm water.  It doesn’t just appear out of nowhere to prove a point about the postmodern relationship between water and air, which can only be inferred from the actual fog event. The environmental conditions become favorable for the creation of fog. Variations in the composition of the air and water would return variations in the resulting fog, thus changing any inference you could make of the fog.  So, creation of the fog (and the variations of fog that could exist) begin to redefine and alter the environment, which in turn redefines how we understand the water and air. We’ll come back to this and more aquatic-themed analogies in a moment.

We can say the same of culture, which is purely defined by the environmental conditions in which it exists at a given moment in time. Something like the recent strikes in Gaza don’t necessarily happen randomly. There’s a complicated history involving knowledge of even more complicated socio-economic issues, more religious/cultural clashes, more geography, etc. Ad infinitum.

News updates about most recent policy decisions and military tactics don’t often enough recount that history. Too often when reports do try to give a back story, it gives insult to the phrase “scratching the surface.” History isn’t news, it’s olds. It’s like watching LOST in the middle of season three; You’d have no sense of place. It is exactly that sort of context that’s needed, what Jay Rosen describes as “explanatory journalism.” (Seriously, stop reading this and go read the CJR piece, if you haven’t yet).

Consider this piece about Salman Rushdie, fatwas, and the West’s undertanding of Muslim culture by Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens takes the position that the ayatollah’s fatwa against Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses represents a point in time that helps define the wider cultural view of Islamic extremism we now understand. It carefully examines how one noteworthy piece of news in the literary world affects and was affected by the collapsing situation in Iran and how it relates to the West’s current dealings with Islam.

I’d like to think of news the same way I think of a Google map. Each news item we come across is a pinpoint fully zoomed in. Except we don’t have the best controls to see the relationships between news items. We can’t easily zoom out for a wider view. Explanatory journalism–that is, news items that step back to take a wider survey is a step in the right direction, giving news consumers one more control, allowing us to zoom out, but again, we’re stuck at the level of information provided in that individual explanatory piece. It is unreasonable to expect that one article fully explain every possible connection. I think we can do better. What if we could zoom around the map (metaphorically speaking, not necessarily graphically speaking)? A mind map, if you will, that allows us to start on the fog and zoom into the atomic structure of the air and out again to see how the fog interacts in greater weather patterns would be most useful.

Wikipedia works in a similar way. You can start on a page about fog and end up, through a series of links, on a page about the first World War. Explanatory journalism can only take us so far. There has to be a better solution that expands the reach of news items into other bisecting news items. If that can be accomplished through painfully complex meta-data, indexing algorithms, crowdsourced linking or what, I do not yet know the answer.

That might be the solution to stemming lost interest. When the next story breaks and the majority of people move on, they could keep that sense of place with them. They could understand how the new information relates to the previous information, even if on the surface the two items seem completely unrelated. And that’s how news becomes a bludgeoning device. The important information can wedge itself into the most recent popular information, where appropriate. Someone could easily drift from the latest celebrity rehab gossip to recent medical studies to recent policy.

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.

Traditional media, as I’ve explained before, are beholden to the limitations of their media. They have no sense of time. A newspaper is an individual physical product. Each issue is a stand alone product. Broadcast has it even worse off because they’re limited entirely to time itself, so if you miss a broadcast, it’s gone into the ether of history. Of course, these can also be advantages.

By focusing entirely on these waves of news, are we missing the entire ocean of information?

I don’t want to suggest that I think the waves are irrelevant. They’re not. We’re just missing out on a huge opportunity.

If there’s one thing I hate about newspaper writing it’s that we spend so much space repeating what we’ve already written.

If there’s two things I hate about newspaper writing it’s that we don’t spend enough space explaining what we’ve already written about.

We too often have a case of too much or too little.

This is why tagging your content matters so much.

I know it’s a simple thing, we see these little guys all the time on the Web, except on many news sites. It needs to be the top priority for your editorial strategies.

When you write a story about X subject and then follow up on X subject repeatedly, it’s incredibly useful for your readers to easily follow the history of the story or find related content. Those tags, not repeating paragraphs, add breadth to your content.

We still think in terms of sections as buckets. You have a news bucket and a business bucket and a lifestyle bucket and we cram content into one of those buckets, no matter how ambiguous the story may be. What if you have an article about the iPhone? It could fit in all three buckets. Plus a technology bucket, plus a bucket specifically for Apple, Inc. Tagging allows you put one piece of content into many buckets.

News has a short shelf life. Tagging every piece of content gives those older pieces new life, in context of the broader picture. It turns every article page into a targeted mini-homepage. It uses the power of databases to aid in relevant serendipity, meaning your users find extra information based on their interests that led them to that original item.

This seems so incredibly simple, so why don’t more news sites do it? Why are we still stuck thinking in terms of traditional section buckets?

I just went on a long rail in the comments over at multimediashooter.com. I think I just woke up too early this morning and I might be a little crabby, but I’m sick of seeing this line of thinking come from my (rather pretentious) colleagues in the Web news business:

Please tell me why these have seen the light of day? No dis-respect to photographers Chris and Jason, I know this is coming from above you, at least I hope, but WTF. Most of us in the industry are fighting not to do ‘video just because we can’ and you guys are doing this! Really, what is the point? I just have to know. Have they given the photo staff video quotas?
I am going to use these as examples of the wrong way to approach newspaper video.

And these from the comments:

I agree, what the heck were they thinking? This is the problem I think many people are facing, management that didn’t understand photojournalism before video, and really doesn’t understand the what multimedia storytelling can really do. This is the video equivalent of someone yelling out to go get a weather picture. Hopefully these two argued their case beforehand.

My guess is that these videos were tagged to a reporter’s online story. Just one more thing that the photo departments will have to deal with until reporters are trained to shoot these video tags themselves. These videos on there own don’t have much to say, but placed in the context of a written story they might give the viewer some added value. Is it what I want to shoot? Hell no.

And again from Richard:

it should read editors defend yourself. I’ve been In the business long enough to know this is beyond photogs. But when you work at a place that uses these pieces as examples of why we ahould be producing five staff videos a day, i feel the need to speak out and say no. This is not the kind of video journalism we should settle for. All eyes are on us as an industry and we have a responsibility to speak up. We should be fighting and talking about this kind of thing to death. I know i didnt become a photojournalist to be told to go shoot video of grass growing. Maybe its time for me to get out of newspapers. And, as for me splashing this out there….well dont forget any jerk with a blog can say what they want.
i think the time to always be nice is over. Its time for some tough love. Dont get too worked up about the spreading of negativity there is always a bad apple in the bunch, but because it looks so ugly and moldy and smells bad it makes the rest of the apples look good.

This was my long winded response:

As a Web producer for mid-sized group of papers, I’m all for tiered video on the Web. By this I mean having a mix of well produced video packages that can stand alone from a written story and short clips packaged with text, graphics and photos that certainly can’t stand alone very well.

Granted, those short clips should somehow enhance the story. And a reporter could just as easily shoot it as a photog.

But, the fact of the matter is that sending photographers out on extended video assignments doesn’t make much sense on deadline either. A photo is arguably easier to produce and it can be used in multiple media (the paper, the Web, cell phones, etc.), whereas video takes generally more time to create and can really only exist on the Web right now; Unless you have some kind of deal with a TV station, that video has a smaller audience than a series of photos. So it makes sense to spend more time on photos than video, thus producing more short clips and saving produced video packages for weekend centerpiece stories.

My argument extends further to text and photos. Why not put the “crap” on the Web, too? Storage and distribution costs may as well be zero and everything on the Web finds an audience regardless of how you perceive the quality. Write briefs about the little league game that will never make the paper, add those photos you don’t have space for in the paper, or that you think are unworthy of print. SOMEONE wants to see it.

This is the beauty of the Web, the crap and the masterpieces are the same value when it comes to serving up advertisements; two eyeballs equals on ad, regardless of what those eye are seeing. There isn’t the problem of limited space and time, like we have with newspapers and TV respectively.

The “archaic” line of thinking is that you only distribute what you think is the best content. You don’t speak for everybody in your audience.

I think it’s time for newspaper and TV people (I’ve worked in both areas) to start understanding the Long Tail of the Web. Google it.

That is all.

And now for another long rail:

To elaborate a little bit further via analogy: YouTube wouldn’t work if you cut off just the best videos on the site. First, deciding the “best” is such a subjective game. Second, cutting off all those videos with, say, fewer than a 1,000 views over the past month would artificially cut off thousands upon thousands of people who want to see these so-called “crap” videos.

YouTube would simply not grow. It would die because some competition would come along and aggregate all the content better.

The problem with we media types is we have a tendency to think we know what our audience wants and needs. Our view of quality is disproportionately higher than our audiences view of quality. We spend all day looking at media of all kinds, and then we either directly or indirectly (it doesn’t matter which) assume that our audience thinks like we do.

This is a confirmation bias and it is wrong! DO NOT purport to know who your audience is, because you are at the fringe of the audience yourself. You cannot see the forest for the trees.

For the most part they (our audiences) do not watch you and watch your competition! They do not necessarily read your newspaper and your Web site. They do not care about us!

They care about a variety of information. You may have a thousand readers who want to know about a city council meeting and one reader who wants to know what the fishing is like at some lake. It’s easy to give them all what they want because space is unlimited and the cost of producing the fishing information is probably much less than the cost of producing the city council information. Since ad space on a page is limited, you’ll get a higher return on eyeballs looking at the fishing information than the council information.

The point is people come to us in hopes that we have what they’re looking for. If they can’t find it, they look somewhere else.

This idea of “general” is dying off. It died in the magazine industry, and the content is flourishing because of it. It’s dying in television and the content is flourishing because of it.

We need to think about our audiences (yes plural). We need to think about niche content. We need to think like spaghetti sauce companies.