Bringing Community Above The Fold

a proposal for preserving journalistic quality in news media

The news business isn't in trouble, exactly. But good journalism shows signs of struggling. According

to the Project for Excellence in Journalism1, 27 percent of front page items in newspapers were about

foreign news in 1977. In 2004, that number had dropped to 14 percent. Magazines and newsweeklies

have shown similar declines in foreign news coverage. The PEJ State of the News Media project

website summarizes the troublesome findings of its 2007 survey2: "Something gained means something

lost, especially as newsrooms get smaller. There is already evidence that basic monitoring of local

government has suffered. Regional concerns, as opposed to local, are likely to get less coverage.

Matters with widespread impact but little audience appeal, always a challenge, seem more at risk of

being unmonitored."

And declining standards are not found just in traditional media outlets. It's been widely reported

throughout the blogosphere that crowd-sourced news sites tend to lose quality after reaching a certain

threshold of popularity. The lowest common denominator triumphs over well-researched articles about

vital issues. Just as with newspapers, superficial items do well because they're just what people want, at

least in the moment. Audiences have a very limited supply of attention, and there is an almost unlimited

demand of content vying for that attention. Therefore, superficially shocking or gimmicky headlines

often are more enticing than deep, complex issues that may not be as pleasant, but sure are a lot more

important.

1www.journalism.org

2 http://stateofthenewsmedia.org/2008/chapter%20pdfs/PEJ2008-Overview.pdf?cat=9&media=1
The PEJ summary goes on to raise important questions for journalists to consider: "What do concepts

like localism and branding really mean? Should only national newspapers maintain foreign bureaus?

Does localism mean provincialism? Should news organizations, so as not to abandon more high-level

coverage, enlist citizen sentinels to monitor community news? To what extent do journalists still have a

role in creating a broad agenda of common knowledge?"

Audiences may innately prefer gimmicky or pandering content, but that won't affect the integrity of

muckracking journalists, right? Increasingly, media outlets will choose to pay their journalists directly

based on how much traffic their reporting generates. This model is an allowance of the explicit traffic

data provided by online distribution, and its already proven to be a success at Gawker Media3. It's a

practice that implicitly condones whatever behavior is necessary to get an active audience, and there

are plenty of short-cuts that don't involve painstaking investigative work.

The news media, and newspapers in particular, therefore need to find a solid business model built

around supporting quality journalism. While this is obvious to many journalists and media executives,

they've been unable thus far to come up with many ideas that have yielded success. Relying on the

groundwork set forth by scholarship on network theory, social capital, and online communities, I've

developed a recommendation for a news reporting format designed to promote good journalism,

talented journalists, and engaged audiences.

Terms and Definitions

3http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2008/01/01/pay-for-traffic-incentive-or-distortion/
Before describing that model, I'd like to clearly illustrate the parameters of this discussion and give

definitions of the most important terms.

First of all, what is journalism? The best concise definition I've found is provided by James Carey in

his essay The Communications Revolution and the Professional Communicator4:

“The function of news is to orient man and society in an actual world. In so far as it succeeds, it tends

to preserve the sanity of the individual and the permanence of society." Carey then lists the factors that

tends to be found in journalistic content. News tends to engage in the practice of determining motives,

elucidating causes, predicting consequences, and estimating significance.

Of course, there is not a binary opposition between "news" content and "not news" content. However, a

large proportion of “news” content may be of some superficial interest, but certainly does not serve to

preserve the permanence of society. As Carey suggests, the more the issues being presented in the item

relate to establishing the permanence of society and the sanity (I prefer "wellbeing") of individuals, the

more we can think of it as the type of good news we want to promote.

And what is meant by "community"? In "Introduction to Virtual Communities Research," Robin

Hamman describes a community as '(1) a group of people (2) who share social interaction (3) and some

common ties between themselves and the other members of the group (4) and who share an area for at

least some of the time'.

However, Danah Boyd argues5 that connection schematics on social networking sites create a very

different type of community, where explicit 'friending' on the network should not be interpreted as

4 Carey, James W. (1989) 'Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society'

5 Boyd. 'Friends, Friendsters, and Top 8: Writing community into being on social network sites '
http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_12/boyd/index.html
expressions of "actual friendship", or friendship in physical space.

"Friendship helps people write community into being in social network sites. Through these imagined

egocentric communities, participants are able to express who they are and locate themselves culturally.

In turn, this provides individuals with a contextual frame through which they can properly socialize

with other participants. Friending is deeply affected by both social processes and technological

advantages...Persistence, searchability, replicability, and invisible audiences are all properties that

participants must negotiate when on social network sites."

I note a similar point on the course blog6 , referencing the work of Clay Shirky, Peter Kollock, and John

Coate about the precarious job of administrating (or designing) an online community.

"Shirky, Kollock, and Coate use different language to express their point, but they touch on one

important distinction - communities online are, or historically have been, very different than those that

exist offline in society. Socities have reputation systems. Whether the reputation system is the simple

word of mouth that exists in small villages, or the legal and credit systems that use persistent identifiers

to track our reputation, we generally know that all behaviors have consequences...This is the type of

“revolt” behavior that is the danger of creating too-successful a communal atmosphere. Shirky

illustrates how this phenomenon works in the real world by using group therapy as an example, where a

researcher found that neurotics always tried to subvert the design of the therapy."

Community and Journalism

6 'Raising a Community' http://connectingthedots.tumblr.com/post/26683677

Community and journalism have a long history of being closely related. In "Communities of

Journalism: A History of American Newspapers and Their Readers", the DNA of colonial-era

newspapers is shown to have been supportive of content for and by the community. Ben Franklin, the

forefather of American journalism, published the archetypal Gazette, which printed "official"

information, but also served as a platform for letter writers to openly criticize public affairs without

fear of persecution. By administering these conversations, colonial newspapers were able to create a

sense of the "public sphere" that Toqueville would later cite as a "palladium of liberty" - a crucial

element of any free society.

Developments such as the invention of television destroyed the "public sphere" by imposing a top-

down structure of news reporting that if not telling people exactly what to think, it certainly didn't

allow those people to express their own views. However, public journalism has recently been gaining in

popularity, ironically enough because of technology that improves upon the monolithic nature of

television. In Jay Rosen's "The Action of the Idea: Public Journalism in Built Form", he describes an

example of modern public journalism taking place in San Francisco, when major media outlets created

a democratically minded project called Voice of the Voter. These experiments involved candidate

debates, polls, targeted local reporting, and citizen participation through e-mail, voice mail, and a

hotline.

Rosen then makes the crucial point that while these activities in 1995 required a great deal of work,

doing so has gotten considerably easier as technology has allowed for technologies like commenting to

be very easily "plugged in"7 to any journalistic content. This brings us to an important topic that is

typically under the radar of journalists - technological standards. Google has succeeded as a search

7 Rosen. 'The Action of the Idea: Public Journalism in Built Form'

engine because it takes advantage of standards. For instance, it uses the information contained in the

<meta> HTML tag to get a better idea of what type of content a given page contains. In fact, an even

better example is found with Google's Blog Search engine, which is still in beta. The page ranks blog

entries from throughout the web by rank of "relevancy". The similar Technorati search engine ranks

blogs according to "authority". The concept is the same. These engines are mapping out the topology of

the network of nodes (blogs, sites) and the connections (links) between them. A connection is worth

more when it comes from a node that itself has lots of incoming connections, and this helps prevent

fraudulent connections that are attempting to game the system.

And thus, the search engine becomes a crucial part of the network. This leads us to a theoretical model

that Chris Anderson has called "the long tail"8.

Networks and The Long Tail

While journalists common believe that the major disruption brought by the Internet is the ability for

8 Anderson, 'The Long Tail'. 2006. New York: Hyperion

audiences to provide comments or feedback on items, they're under-estimating the magnitude of the

disruption. Of course, the Internet does allow for audiences to easily provide feedback to news items.

But the true revolution of information consumption on the web is the aggregation of information, which

levels the playing field between items and "feedback". The aggregation of information is powerful

business mechanism (with evidence provided by Google's meteoric rise) and even more

importantly, aggregating or sharing information is a social practice. And it's a necessary practice, as

information has become exponentially more abundant and attention has become far more scarce. In the

long tail model, the tall short head of product interaction takes place with properties that, as Albert-

Laszlo Barabasi writes in Linked: The New Science of Networks "create indebtedness and reliance over

the long haul."9 In other words, the search engine gains its position as the hub of the network because

of its indispensable role: all the other nodes are reliant on it to match the intent of the system's users to

the long tail content of individual nodes.

Blogs represent a constantly increasing proportion of those network nodes, collectively generating an

astounding amount of information. This especially holds if we have a loose definition of what a "blog"

may be. Let's assume for a moment that in addition to the 5% or so of Americans that create content on

their own sites or blogs, about 15% more somehow broadcast/narrowcast the items they enjoy. This can

include posted items on a social network, or the sharing functionality being built directly into news

consumption software. Google's own Reader software, for instance, has recently expanded in

functionality allowing recommendations based on the user's social network and their own historical

record of browsing behavior.

Thus, the reader software acts as a sort of attention agent, and the user of the software is potentially

9p. 209. Barabasi. 'Linked: The New Science of Networks'

engaging in what blogger Scott Karp has called "link journalism"10. This term refers to how the act of

linking itself can be journalistic in nature. Karp wrote, "Link journalism is linking to other reporting on

the web to enhance, complement, source, or add more context to a journalist’s original reporting." The

Drudge Report pioneered this type of aggregation-based journalism, which is now much more

commonplace.

And if we imagine a world in which every person has a blog - if every person, in effect, can somewhat

easily (or automatically) generate their own Drudge Report, then we can begin to picture an ecosystem

of information in which the connections between published items information and the sharing of that

information takes precedent over the initial publication stage at which journalists traditionally consider

their job to be over. The news reporting format is, from its inception, a linked discussion.

As with any social practice within a network of self-motivated actors, this activity is propelled by self

motivation. We've seen that blogs link to one another in order to increase their own hierarchal rank of

authority. Especially as social networks are beginning to closely map real people to their virtual

representations, domains, and outlets, people are increasingly sharing links to information in order to

increase the authority of their person.

And this is the core of good journalism's future model. A feedback loop must be enforced between

good, valuable journalism and the people who use their own authority to promote that journalism. The

glue between them, I'd argue, is the link, which connects the authority of the piece of valued journalism

to the authority of those who use their own platform to promote it.

10http://publishing2.com/2008/02/25/how-link-journalism-could-have-transformed-the-new-york-times-reporting-on-
mccain-ethics/
Some media professionals already have an understanding of the extended, decentralized journalistic

network at work. But they're missing the most important piece. It has to do with the greatest asset of

any journalistic platform – space.

Community Above The Fold

The screenshot above shows a feature of the tech news aggregator TechMeme. Any time the main item

is linked to by another source with a certain threshold of authority, that secondary source of discussion

is included at the site of the aggregation. The result is that engaged members of the "audience" of the

item are themselves promoted, along with the TechMeme aggregator, along with the main story, and

along with the TechMeme aggregator itself.

This feature is closely related to what have been called 'trackbacks'11 within the blogosphere. When an

item on Blog A is linked to by Blog B (which expresses engagement in discussion about the topic on

Blog A), a link to Blog B appears alongside the item on Blog A. Notably, the trackback system is built

on a) widely adopted standards and b) highly automated processes. Both of these contribute to its

widespread adoption and success.

11http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trackback
The practice of pulling in discussion from the network, and effectively becoming a news aggregator,

will be the new successful business model of news organizations. In fact, within a few years, I predict

that it will be common practice for news organizations to dedicate half of their "front page" space to the

"short head" of professionally-created content, and the other half of front page space to the long tail of

community-created discussion content. While experimenting with deep integration of community

discussion, they'll see that while superficial stories may get lots of traffic, they don't generate

discussion.

Therefore, by promoting those who discuss vital stories, a positive feedback loop will be created to

support strong journalism, important news items, and engaged community members.

Objections

Many journalists would object to this proposal, arguing that something akin to "miscegenation" would

occur through a) the inter-mingling of amateur and professional content and b) the aggregation of third-

party content from third-party platforms.

By now, the first argument should be a moot point. Journalists are not typically as adamant as they once

were in their insistence in leaving the profession to the professionals. This is because the explosive

growth of the blogosphere has rendered the position to be untenable. However, some news

organizations have reacted to the popularity of blogs by giving blogs to their own reporters, in what

amounts to a simulated mock-up of the blogosphere. The New York Times, in particular, has been

aggressive about nurturing a large internal blog plantation. I agree with criticisms from Mark Cuban12

12http://www.blogmaverick.com/2008/03/13/blogging-and-newspapers-a-lesson-in-how-not-to-brand-and-market/
and others that while it is fine for a journalist to blog, and even be hosted by their organization,

journalists can no longer consider their core competency to be analysis and opinion. Frankly, that's

everyone's job, and people who are good at it will be rewarded with increased network stature.

Journalists must focus on the really tough, often unpleasant work of deep research and detailed

reporting, with consistent attention paid to the ethics and procedures that separate their work from that

of amateurs.

Even more journalists and executives would be horrified at the notion of aggregating content not hosted

by their own organization or on its domain. They'd suggest that such a practice would hurt both the

quality and the revenue of their own product. This second argument brings us back to the diagram of

the long tail, and the fallacy many journalists have over how to become a destination for visitors.

Search engines and social networks vie for that space with an astronomical vertical range (immense

amounts of traffic) and minuscule horizontal space (room for only a handful of players). Everything

else occupies the long tail space of niche content.

Journalists must understand that those products that are able to occupy the "short head" are those that

function as powerful aggregators - search engines and social networks, specifically13. It is very, very
13http://voson.anu.edu.au/papers/link_economy.pdf
difficult to become a destination (or “start point” as labelled in the diagram) for a large number of

visitors with a “walled garden” strategy. Therefore, news websites need to be vigilant about supporting

content syndication and understanding that their organization will increasingly aggregate content

created by third-parties on third-party platforms. They also should be actively pushing their own

content outward so that it, in turn, can be aggregated by other platforms.

Even newspapers can get into the action. The promotion of discussion on third-party platforms cannot

be automatic as it is on the web, but it is still very possible by allowing related content generated on the

web to find its way back to the paper. Let's consider the example of the episode multiple

installment story that has gained popularity over the last decade. After the first installment runs, future

installments can dedicate space - the paper's greatest asset - to promoting those who are discussing the

story on their own platforms.

In fact, this type of system works wonderfully for daily papers, which should be using the space they

now give to commodified wire stories to instead promote those who are engaging in discussion about

their content. I don't think it's unreasonable at all that within ten years, a paper like the New York Times

will dedicate half of its page space to reporting or discussion not having originated from Times writers.

It's complete heresy, of course. But that won't stop it from saving good journalism as we know it.

The Head, The Middle, and The Tail

There's a great quote by serial entrepreneur Jason Calacanis: “The short head will be human, the fat

middle social and the long tail algorithmic”

The quote is about the future of the web at large, but it could apply to the dilemma of saving Good

Journalism. It helps us understand how in a world where content itself is a commodity, what

differentiates one discussion aggregator from another.

The answer lies in between the short head of professional content and the long tail of community

discussion. It's the middle, and in this case, it's the editing procedure, which is both boolean in nature

(either content is filtered in, or out) and also related to the spatial layout of content. Dave Winer has

argued14 that news sites should replace their newspaper style layout with the reverse-chronological

format favored by RSS readers, and I'd argue that news organizations should allow their content to be

syndicated so that it could viewed in such a style, but spatial editing is going to remain a key

component of the journalistic process. The editing is likely going to be a mixture of automated filters

(such as authority-checks and spam filters) but the human touch, I predict, will remain a necessity for

good journalism (and good news brands) to thrive.

There are already examples in the wild of outlets attempting to promote good journalism by using the

power of crowds. NewsTrust15 is a good example, although it takes too much from the playbook of a

ranking site like Digg, and not enough from the trackback-based aggregation of a site like Techmeme.

Of course, what is also currently lacking is the second greatest asset offered by traditional media outlets

- their brands.

To summarize the claims being made in this paper, I've proposed that a sustainable model for good
14http://www.scripting.com/stories/2008/03/14/howInternetNewsShouldWork.html
15www.newstrust.net
journalism can be achieved with a "short head" of incredibly talented reporters, a fat middle of expert-

edited aggregation of community discussion, which is assisted through the long tail of algorithmic

optimization to route content at a network level. By using this sequence, a journalistic outlet can create

stories that dynamically update over time - a living, breathing news item that continues to provide

information to individuals and generate revenue for the organization. Just as Google has become a

mega-hub for general information retrieval, the opportunity is now available for the first known brands

to become the mega-hub of Good Journalism. And there's room for smaller outlets as well. While an

ordinary blogger wouldn't have the necessary authority to make it onto the front page of CNN's

aggregator, they may have the authority to get to the front page of their hometown newspaper's

aggregator.

Of course, this model is a far cry from the status quo, and that brings us to the issue of what a

journalism school should be doing to teach the necessities of this model to its students. But then again,

that would be grounds for another essay altogether.