News fix #56 big ideas in small packages
I'm back with your weekly news fix, and I'm happy we're in this together. If you're new here, welcome! Get in touch anytime; I'd love to hear from you.
As a reporter I tend to over-index on facts and structure and go light on narrative. I do care about good storytelling, in general, but much less so in news.
One of my closely held but unpopular opinions is that a surplus of narrative distracts, or at least tries to, from journalism’s lack of utility. People want compelling stories and useful reporting. These are two separate desires each requiring different and carefully honed skills. There are incredible reporters who are also gifted storytellers, but they’re rare. Most of us have to choose. I think our communities would be better off if we concentrated on the reporting.
I think it's also rare that the instances in which useful reporting requires a strong narrative as the proverbial spoon full of sugar. Frustratingly, we don’t really understand the degree to which narrative are more than a delivery system for information but also necessary to act on it. We know narrative helps us to remember, and we know it is essential for meaning making. But does our reporting need so much narrative? As reporting condensed to a text or WhatsApp message is effective, valued and can be acted upon, we know it doesn’t.
I watched the new film adaptation of The Odyssey, a narrative so elemental and powerful it is still being adapted three thousand years after it was first told. It really made me think about the power of narrative, and how separate that art might be from the core of our jobs as reporters. The movie was gorgeous and compelling, and I loved watching it in a sold out theater. Less gorgeous and compelling was the World Cup final, which I also watched this past weekend. I had a great time during the game anyway, because I was with hundreds of others at an outdoor watch party where we waited together for something exciting to happen and just drank beer in the meantime. Communal settings, like narratives, have meaning-making power.
If you’ve been spending your time engaging with culture or community and have fallen behind on your reading about news and information, good for you! I’ve got you. Some thoughtful and recent pieces about big issues in news are worth opening in a tab and saving for a rainy day, by which I mean your next conference call.
What we value: Joshua Benton at Nieman Lab already did the lords work of breaking down a study that captured four years of news audience research into just a few lessons. The biggest one is: the way most people spend their time online and what they truly value are not the same.
The study’s authors had an incredible amount of audience data from one (unidentified other than to say it served a large metro area) news site. Among other things, researchers looked at what the newsroom produced, the traffic it generated and how specific stories drove subscriptions. The primary goal of this news organization is not service, it’s owned by private equity and has a paywall. Still, the more service-oriented hard news reporting it did on things like civics, health, and the economy is what drove subscriptions (but not enough to make the economics of this particular newsroom work). Thanks to News Alchemists for flagging this study, which I otherwise would have missed.
Logical fallacies: Know what my siren song sounds like? It's this sentence, “I'm struck over and over again by how many arguments about the future of journalism are logically unsound,” to the rhythm of a Gregorian chant.
That line comes from Shirish Kulkarni, who warns us in his new piece that our desire to navigate the furious pace of AI development might distract us from a fundamental question too many of us are still trying to keep at bay, “what do people and communities actually need from us.” Kulkarni rightly points out that a great deal of the tension in news around truly assessing and then meeting audience need is the difficulty in coming to terms with the difference between active news consumers and passive news consumers. We're scared of bringing audiences closer to us because of what that might mean we are on the hook for.
These costs are real: Lest we forget that news, when done right, doesn't just create value for individuals but helps communities preserve resources, a new analysis by Rebuild Local News reminds us that a lack of local news costs communities real money. Municipal bond issuers charge higher interest rates to places without health local news ecosystems, because they know that mismanagement and corruption are more likely in those places. This analysis builds on earlier studies but goes a step further to quantify how much it costs in extra interest, per household and state-by-state to live in a news desert. The range is from $7 to 76 dollars a year.
On attention: So much of what we wonder about and work with in news is a quest to harness our own and others attention. I understand I'm asking a lot when I want you to spend time with me questioning the power of narrative. Or, just to spend time thinking deeply about your own work and how it relates to the ideas surfaced here. I have a relatively new obsession with Simone Weil, a French philosopher who died in 1943 at age 34, and have been reading her work all summer. I've decided she is the patron philosopher of journalists, which I'll write about more at some point. One (not the only) reason why is because she wrestled so consistently and carefully with the idea of attention. For Weil attention was a form of love and prayer. I write these missives to you as both a loving act and a prayer that they'll bring us closer to meaningful work together. I really appreciate you reading them because I see your attention as either love or prayer, too. I'll leave you with just one recently discovered Weil line (from this essay) about just how hard it is to pay attention. “Something in our soul has a far more violent repugnance for true attention than the flesh has for bodily fatigue.”
Until next week, take care! If you can, forward this along to somebody else you want to pay attention with.