tumbledry

Improving journalism

The 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get at Newsless.org makes so much sense to me. I always thought that I didn’t understand a lot of current events reporting because I wasn’t rabidly following every minor detail — that the onus was on me to put the article in context. In the aforelinked article, Matt Thompson argues that news becomes more engaging, more useful, better, when put into context. Thompson uses a recent, spectacular Atul Gawande article in the New Yorker as an example of journalism done right:

What Gawande did was to structure his search for truth as a quest narrative. Instead of hiding the details about how he comes by his information, he makes that the very focus. Along the way, he makes us apprentices in his quest for truth. We finish the article with a highly refined sense of how Gawande has acquired and verified the information he presents, as well as a framework for further inquiry of our own.

We get a lot more out of this type of reporting, in other words, than the vast majority of news stories, which leave these details out.

Readers want to be taken along on fact-gathering missions, not given a desiccated outline of the current facts. This change in journalistic style necessitates a certain liquidity of article length — the internet is the perfect medium in which to indulge journalist’s desire for a higher word count. Disseminate the present facts in the daily paper, then put those facts in context using the newspaper’s website.

Brief Notes Nearby