Assemble-It-Yourself Component-Based Journalism

Contra Jeff Bezos' dream of returning to the Glorious Bundle of the Newspaper, I think we need to unbundle Journalism itself.

Context/goal (of the Reflective Thinker-reader): Making Sense of the world through 2nd-hand streams.

Forces:

  • It's difficult to become an Expert on something from the outside.
  • The typical Journalist is a Generalist, a deep expert in no more than 0-1 topics. (Gell Mann Amnesia)
  • Advertising-driven publications try to drive multi-visits-per-day by having a continuous feed of new content.
  • Journalists like to eat and pay rent, so they rarely say "no I shouldn't write about that topic I know nothing about".
  • Because Digital Media and Social Media have sped the pace of content production/consumption, there seem to be fewer opportunities to hold an article on a hot topic until it is better understood.
  • The "objective" or Neutral Point Of View is often not very helpful. An Expert has often been Captured by the Status Quo. Having a clear description of each writer's Point Of View is more transparent/honest.
  • The reader's need for Making Sense of the world is not dry/objective, but tied to their own desires/contexts.

Solution:

  • Sources Go Direct
  • Journalist-s should be more explicitly/honestly Curators of other sources. Direct interviews should be isolated just like a 3rd-party article.
  • Maybe Journalists (and bloggers) need a system like LinkedIn "endorsements" to tag their viewpoints/contexts and areas of actual Expertise, to make it easier for readers to fit them into a bigger picture.
  • Stories should be broken up into small/granular chunks (Structured Writing?), each with its own explicit purpose/lede. A Macro Story container provides a map/Table Of Contents for the chunks (not just a list like the old Yahoo News Full Coverage). Chunks will be added over the course of days/weeks, with the Macro Story being updated accordingly. Sometimes an earlier chunk will be made obsolete by a new chunk with the same topic: the old chunk should disappear or get over-written, but should disappear from the Macro Story, and the old-chunk should have a link to the new-chunk at its top. Of course it's not a clean hierarchy, EverythingIsAGraph (of hypertext).
  • Blog Comment systems should make "best" comments much more visible, and allow both reader-mass and writer/editor input into selection.
  • Readers (still) need to seek multiple journalists to follow with appropriately matching contexts. They need their own ThinkingSpace to anchor their Sense-Making. Ideally it's a publicly-readable space like a WikiLog so it becomes components for others.
  • Clusters of people with shared context might help each other: Social Warrens.
  • hrm I think we need a more disruptive business model/structure to provide an income to good researchers and communicators, without Aggregators.

cf 2013-05-13-RosenQuartzCrowdsourcedJournalism, 2012-12-03-JournalismServiceListsOutlinesAndData


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