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.

Howard Owens has been arguing with what seems to be the entire videography field over this for too long.

Having worked in the TV news business and in newspaper Web sites, I can say without a doubt that 1 hour production time is well within reason for most videos. If a TV photographer can’t work under that kind of pressure, they’re in the wrong business. I’ve seen photogs edit great VO-SOTs (Voice Over to Sound On Tape, usually a talking head, for the uninitiated)–with linear bays, no less!–in under 10 minutes.

Multitasking skills, solid understanding of shooting basics and good division of labor (where possible) are key to kicking out quality vids fast. Newspapers just aren’t prepared for this quite yet. Thankfully, we’re starting to get there.

It all comes down to the economics of the medium.

Documentary film is meant for larger scale audiences. With TV, everybody watching is going to see that long, well-produced packaged. On the Web, not everybody hitting the homepage cares about that well-crafted 2:30 package on whatever. They just won’t click on it. Because they don’t care or something else on the site interests them more and their time is limited.

You might get a few hundred views from interested people in a day and then that video falls into oblivion. News has a pretty short shelf life.

Why spend 5 hours on one video, when you can spend 5 hours on 5 videos to get a thousand or more page views (a few hundred times 5+) and possibly increase time on site (assuming some users might watch more than just one video)? Put more “crap” on the Web.

This nonsense about the “craft” is infuriating. We’re not in a storytelling business (if we were our stories wouldn’t be so overwhelmingly boring; Very few newspapers write terribly compelling long form pieces with any regularity. And yes I know that statement will piss people off–deal with it. I consistently read better articles in my wife’s copy of Glamour than most of the stuff the newspapers I read put out every year). We’re here to disseminate information to an audience. Who. What. Where. When. Why.

Which suggests we should strive to better understand our audience.

We in the news business get so hung up with ourselves we usually forget about what our audience actually wants. We need to stop being so high and mighty.

In live TV, I’d go home pissed about a horrible show. Everything went wrong in production. Supers were mixed up, cues were late or missed, the guy on the audio board was asleep at the wheel and the studio camera crew couldn’t properly frame up shots. And I’d get home, fuming. I’d start to rant to my wife or my in-laws or my friends about everything and rarely, very rarely did they ever notice these details that I thought ruined everything. They were still able to parse the info they needed. They didn’t have the same notions about my product as I did.

And this is our problem. A good story might come up and we won’t cover it because we’ve covered a similar story earlier, assuming everybody else in the world already knows about it. Christ. What is wrong with that? Anyone who has ever looked at Web traffic data can tell you, rolling their eyes no less, that it’s simply not true. Nobody, except for a few people at the paper reads every story. Nobody!

Getting back to Web video. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t strive to do great videos. We certainly shouldn’t do video for the sake of doing video.

But, we should stop worrying about the little details. Who cares if the edit isn’t quite tight enough or the audio is a bit too hot? We do. But we care too much! Just ask yourself if the video and any accompanying package gives the audience what they need. Then move on to the next story.

There’s this weird tradition in news media that if we don’t produce the best possible craft we can, we’ll lose our readers. Look at it like this: First, we’re already losing readers. Second, there are people in your audience that care about higher quality and people that don’t.

First, target the group that will make you more money, then, when you’ve nailed that model down, go after the other group. Look for tangible results. Because honestly, that’s what your advertisers are looking for.

While intangibles like “reputation” and “preferred source” and “best” are nice for marketing yourself to clients or possible new readers, they’re not as valuable in the long tail market.

People want what they want. Brand hardly matters. Or rather, information is brand.

The Associated Press: AP Urges News Industry to Embrace Online

I’ve put a lot of thought into this in my young journalism career.

The methods of gathering news hardly change. Only the delivery mechanisms. We still go out and engage the community, ask questions. But we now have amazing opportunity to really listen to our audience. That’s the “institutional arrogance” that Curley is talking about. I’m saying this at my own risk: This entire industry may not really be listening while we communicate.

As aggregators and producers of information (news or otherwise), we can only benefit by being closer to our communities, online or off. The Web is most valuable when it provides a gathering point for discussion. That discussion can be about products (Amazon and eBay), humorous news (Fark.com) or video (YouTube, Vimeo, and a million other sites). The Web is just another bar, another softball field, another book club.

The beauty of the Web, in my eyes, is that it lowers the bar for anyone to produce media, to share their thoughts and expertise on any topic with anyone who happens across their site. That isn’t competition, that’s opportunity to listen to and engage our audience, on a one-to-one level and on a global scale at the same time.

The best we can do is facilitate and become a part of the discussions going on in our communities.

Same as always.