- Week 347
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Weeknotes always seem to be written by people who are extremely busy and/or enthusiastic. Let’s look back at last week (346) and momentarily buck that trend.
I knew that my news project was both vague and ambitious and that I might fail to produce anything useful or interesting. But I did expect to produce something. Unfortunately, after two days I was even more lost than when I started. And, adding two solid days of reading news websites to a few weeks of pondering the problems, I was sick to death of thinking about news.
So the whole thing ground to a halt and I spent the rest of the week doing other odds and ends while trying not to feel like an aimless, over-hyping failure. I had no idea what I’d been trying to do. One of the problems with working on solo projects is finding a way out of the holes one digs without help.
I would like to return to the project in some way, but with a more manageable scope. Maybe focusing initially just on an interface that would make me keener to read news online than I currently am, clicking through one slow, cluttered webpage at a time. In the meantime, sorry if you were looking forward to me revolutionising the world of news.
Back to week 347, this week… Some client work came up at rather short notice, and I’m spending the week helping with the planning and wireframing of the project I was already going to be working on for much of March and April. In good Weeknotes tradition, I’ll give it my own codename: Project Humphrey. It’s good to be working with other people again, batting ideas around and slowly making amorphous ideas more concrete. The final website should be both fun and worthwhile, which is always a bonus, and I know I’ll find it useful.
Onwards.
In Week notes on 8 February 2010. Add a comment. Permalink
- Replace comments with letters pages
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I like this, a CSS file that hides comments on many popular websites. It feels a bit like we’re very slowly turning a corner when it comes to how we think of commenting (unless it’s merely my wishful thinking).
Comments can be great of course. I generally find comments on my own site useful, pleasant, interesting and ego-stroking. Because my site isn’t very popular so I don’t get many. But we all know that any hugely popular site will generate dozens, hundreds of comments on any page, which almost no one will read through.
(I like to think The Diary of Samuel Pepys sits at a lucky point on this continuum: popular enough to generate a bunch of interesting comments from nice people every day, but not popular enough to drown in noisy idiots.)
Comments on YouTube are a standing joke for their dumbness. BBC News’ Have Your Say has a site dedicated to highlighting its worst nonsense. Engadget recently turned off its comment system for a while because things had “gotten out of hand”.
Over the past decade or more we’ve developed many systems to allow the good comments to bubble to the top. Some work a bit, some don’t. Often they’re a little too complicated for the mass-appeal sites that have the biggest problems.
So maybe popular sites should simply turn comments off.
If I was an attention-seeking, “controversial” columnist I’d be saying this is the only solution. ALL comments are bad, the internet is RUBBISH and ALL commenting should be BANNED! Bring back Web 1.0!
I’m not saying this, just that maybe comments don’t always help.
I expect many stubborn, old-media institutions have only recently come round to the idea that such “user-generated content” should feature on their websites. Maybe they were right to be cautious. Comment sections on most popular sites provide an outlet for people who become noisy, aggressive and egotistical online. I don’t know how you’d decide when comments will add to a site and when they’ll just provide a place where a tiny community of people will get shouty. It’s tricky and there’s no one solution for everybody.
But here’s what I’d like to see more of: letters pages. Edited, curated letters pages.
I enjoy reading letters in print publications. People who have something worth saying have taken the trouble to write or email in, and the best have been chosen to be printed. This doesn’t preclude discussion among the readers: the back-and-forth can go on for months. And the letters can, online, be added to the original article. For example, this London Review of Books article about the @ sign features a great, but brief, discussion spanning four months. All signal, no noise, and worth waiting for.
So maybe something more like that would be a more interesting solution for high-traffic sites. Replace moderators with editors who select submitted comments and then collate the best ones into a daily or weekly article for the site. It’s not as immediate, but that’s nice sometimes. A breather. Room to think.
I’m not sure it would work for something like YouTube, but maybe it would be best for more focused sites with their own content. I go to them to read their content, after all, not to hear from every fellow reader with something to get off their chest. Maybe, for sites that originated in print, it would merely be an expansion of their current letters pages.
Anyway, I just thought it would be far more civilised, and interesting, than the usual knee-jerk morass of comments threads in which the few valuable responses get lost.
In Misc on 4 February 2010. Add a comment. Permalink
- News week, day 2
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Today started a little better than yesterday on the news project. With two days’ worth of news I was already starting to see themes that would extend across the week, stories that would be worth condensing and summarising in a weekly round-up. But I’ve also started wondering if I’m trying to tackle the wrong problem.
I have two main dissatisfactions with reading news online. First, some of the priorities of what appears on “news” websites don’t match my own interests at all. Often this is a matter of all the opinion, lifestyle, sport, competitions, etc stories cluttering the place up — they only amplify the feeling that the websites aren’t created by or for people like me. Sometimes it’s simply odd priorities in which stories feature in the actual news sections. You know, rubbish like this.
Second, the design and structure of most of the websites get in the way of reading the news. The worst are sites like the New York Times or the Times which split some stories onto multiple pages, or Salon or the Times of India which throw out pop-up advertising windows like it’s still the twentieth century. But even more reasonable sites are full of clutter, distracting the reader from the story they’re on the page to read, and slowing down page loading times.
If these problems are my biggest concern, it means I’ve started this project by tackling the wrong one. In reading lots of news and attempting to summarise and re-write the stories I’m trying to fix the journalism and writing itself. And that’s not something I have a problem with. Well, there are often stories in which the journalist has no idea what they’re writing about, the kind of thing that gets picked up by Ben Goldacre, or stories about the Internet where I can tell they’ve got things wrong. But with most of the important news stories I have to assume they’re accurate. I’m certainly not knowledgeable enough to re-write them better without a huge amount of research.
So, now, I’m not sure what the point of this project is. The bulk of my time is being devoted to reading a lot of news stories so I can re-write them, when there’s not much wrong with them in the first place. This feels like a stupid. and increasingly dull, use of my time.
So that’s a bugger.
While I wonder whether or how to continue, there are a couple of related things that I can see could be useful.
A weekly news summary could be good at bringing together related strands of stories that are treated separately day-to-day. For example, stuff about Obama’s budget, or about climate change, could usefully be brought together and summarised. It still requires an awful lot of reading and writing though.
The other thing I’ve found myself wanting while reading news stories is more context. Almost any story that mentions figures — profits and losses; budgets; temperature changes; growth rates; numbers of accidents, deaths and disasters — would benefit from historical data, ideally presented graphically. It’s so hard to understand whether these figures are actually big news when you have little understanding of their context. The Guardian’s print edition, for one, often pulls statistics out into large, eye-catching numbers that always seem a little pointless. Perhaps a better use of the space would be a small graph showing the statistic’s historical value.
So, there we go. Planning speculative things in public like this is a bit awkward when it appears that they’re not working out. I’ll have a think about what to do. Any thoughts appreciated, as struggling through vague projects on one’s own can be very frustrating.
In Misc on 2 February 2010. 4 comments. Permalink
- News week, day 1
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I was anticipating a period in this news project when I would feel lost and like nothing was working. Most projects have them. I just didn’t expect the feeling to start before I’d begun: last night was full of dreams in which I was endlessly reading and summarising news websites but getting nowhere and making no sense.
After a day of browsing and reading news websites I’m not feeling any more positive. I thought I’d spend the first day or two of this week — a week during which I’d compile a single online “newspaper” summarising the important stuff — getting up to speed with what’s happening. I don’t read/see/hear much news normally, so I knew I’d be in at the deep end.
But I’m feeling more lost than I expected, sooner than I expected. I can’t see what I’m aiming for.
Reading news websites has been a depressing experience. Not because of downbeat news, but because the sites are all so similar. In a world of 6.7 billion people, I thought there’d be more important stuff happening. More variety, more depth. Or perhaps I’m just way too hazy about what I think is important. (Actually, I should probably spread my net further afield too: I have been woefully UK/US-centric.)
Also, whatever the content, news websites are pretty appalling if you just want to read the news. Every page is crammed full of irrelevant, eye-catching nonsense urging you to leave this page and visit another one. It’s often impossible to tell which stories on a front page are news and which are strident opinions from someone I don’t care about. Front pages often leave the dates off stories so it’s also impossible to tell which bits of news are, er, new.
It’s like newspaper websites don’t want you to find their few good bits. And there are good bits. I have a greater respect for people who write detailed stories that require an in-depth knowledge of a particular domain. I realise now that even summarising a bunch of these stories will be a lot of work. Journalists really need to know their stuff to get these articles out speedily. So it’s a shame the few good news stories are hidden among so much opinion and “human interest”, and so many competitions and sponsored features and just awful, worthless, terrible, shit.
And breathe. Having written that, I have gone back and realised that the Guardian’s front page is the most annoying of the lot, which is a shame as it was the paper I thought I had the most affinity with. The page is full of things that just aren’t news. I really have no idea what their priorities are but, top-left of the page aside, it doesn’t appear to be news. The slightly obscure “Main section“‘s page appears to be where today’s news lives (thanks for the tip, Paul).
So, anyway, yes, I’m frustrated with this project already, only one day in. Maybe it’ll get better once I’m more familiar with everything, and the purpose will gradually emerge.
In the meantime, if you can suggest any sites that feature news which might be important, that are different from the mainstream UK/US news sites, do post something in the comments. Ta.
[No week notes this week, as I’ll be documenting this project as I go instead. Probably.]
- Next week’s news
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After those bits of background, mulling over what I’ve been thinking, here’s what I’m going to do next week. I’m going to spend the week writing an online news website. Part of me is still wondering why, so here are some reasons.
First, I get frustrated with the priorities and choices that news sources make. Some of these seem blatantly wrong (choosing stories for sensation rather than actual importance) and some simply don’t work for me. Reacting negatively to this — pointing out the bits I think are wrong — is easy. Finding a positive solution — working out what mix of stories I think is right — is harder. It’s a problem I’d like to think through by doing.
Second, I’m interested in what a small-scale news website could do and how useful it could be. It’s hard to get smaller than a single person. Most general news websites seem to cater for quite a mass audience, presumably because they cost a lot to run. If a site could provide a broad news coverage but with a tiny budget, could it be more relevant and appealing to a smaller market?
Obviously, a news site with a miniscule staff and budget couldn’t do what a “proper” organisation could. It would mean little or no original reporting or foreign correspondents or highly-paid columnists. It would, I imagine, be very basic re-reporting of the news. Real journalists might sneer at this — it’s merely writing rather than journalism — but a lot of what fills our newspapers and news sites falls into this category. They all cover the same stories and few interpretations offer much that’s unique.
Sometimes it seems that this re-reporting of news is all the press is doing: when the Daily Telegraph was drip-feeding the world with its information about MPs’ expenses, the rest of the media could do little more than report what the Telegraph was discovering.
In a way this activity feels like it falls somewhere between blogging and the simplest kind of journalism. I doubt I’d make a good journalist, but this kind of curating, summarising and explaining appeals to me.
Thirdly, or perhaps two-point-fively, I wonder how much useful material can be generated by someone in a week. I’ll probably spend the week reading a lot of existing news and re-writing, quoting, linking, summarising it all, but I have no concept of how much material I’ll have after a week. Will it be a useful quantity? Or a pitiful, useless amount?
This is one reason I’m focusing on producing a weekly “issue” of a “newspaper”, rather than something daily. I’m not sure I could produce enough in a day to be broad news coverage, particularly given that I’m currently very out of touch with current affairs. Getting up to speed will be a big challenge in itself.
But also, as a reader, a weekly is enough news for me. There is hardly any news I need to hear about on the hour or every day. I used to read a newspaper once a week as a summary of what was going on, and so I’m looking to fill that gap in my media consumption.
So there we go, that’s what I’ll be doing next week. All being well I’ll publish the result, whatever it is, at the end of the week. That might be enough. What I produce could be terrible, a waste of my time and yours. Maybe I’ll learn nothing and no one will want to read it. Or maybe there’ll be something in it and I’ll want to try again for another week and improve it. We’ll see.
In Misc on 28 January 2010. 2 comments. Permalink
- Small publishers of news
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Yesterday I wrote about my frustrations with current sources of news. There’s another main reason for my current news-related project though, and that’s more optimistic.
I’m not alone in wondering what will happen to news online, what with newspapers dithering about whether people should pay to read some or all of their articles. But, while it’s interesting to ponder what will happen to existing large news organisations, I’m also interested in what their future means for smaller, maybe not-yet-existing, sources of news.
Let’s sketch out some hasty scenarios.
First, let’s say that all, or the majority, of big news sites set up paywalls and this works for them — they make enough money to keep going and the paywalls stay up. This seems like an opportunity for smaller sites, with lower overheads, who don’t do the expensive stuff but can satisfy a large enough audience to get by on advertising (or whatever else they can think of).
Or, second, maybe paywalls are tried and they don’t work. Few people are willing to pay for what they think of as “free”, and the existing newspapers’ readers move to sites that can afford to provide news for “free” (ie, with no up-front costs to the reader).
In this scenario, and paywalls don’t work, existing newspapers are going to be in trouble, in the absence of any other bright ideas. I imagine, whether they stay behind their paywalls or re-emerge, we’ll see several failing and the survivors combining. There will be less variety than there is currently which, maybe, again leaves space in the market for smaller, distinctive sources of news catering to readers who want something different.
Or, a third scenario: maybe there’s an alternative to what we currently think of as paywalls. Maybe there will soon be a way to publish “print” material and have people pay for it in a manner they don’t mind. The web feels like it should be free, but maybe there will be a new media, one where the inconvenience costs of transactions are low enough that many people will happily pay up front.
It’s easy to speculate wildly about such possibilities for the next few hours, until (I had to mention it) Apple probably release its new device which many hope will do for publishing what iTunes and the iPod etc. have done for music. If that’s the case maybe we’ll see a flourishing of small “presses”, just as we’ve seen a flurry of people and small companies making money from selling iPhone apps.
Alternatively, of course, for individuals it could be more the print equivalent of podcasts — a great way for people to distribute their own versions of existing media (radio), but not necessarily to charge for it. That’s not a terrible thing. Simply having an easier means of distribution, and a good way of consuming the media, is an improvement for people who want to publish on a low budget.
This isn’t a rigorous look at possible futures, and it’s far from objective; I’m actively looking and hoping for opportunities for small publishers of news because I want there to be alternatives to the existing ones. Maybe even ones I want to read.
In Misc on 27 January 2010. Add a comment. Permalink
- Looking for news
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I mentioned in yesterday’s weeknote that I’m currently working on personal project about news. I’ll describe the project itself later in the week, but first a bit of background. There are two main thoughts that have lead me to this project, and here’s the first.
I don’t read, watch or listen to any news these days. Well, certainly no conventional news: newspapers, the Ten O’Clock News, the Today programme, etc. The only current affairs news I’m aware of comes through friends mentioning it on email/Twitter, catching sight of newspaper headlines, and watching The Daily Show.
I’m not proud of this. We should all know what’s going on in the world. But I haven’t found a news source I like enough to devote any time or money to absorbing. I’m too impatient to watch TV news and there’s almost no part of my day when talk radio isn’t a distraction.
I used to read the Guardian once a week but, as with all newspapers, the OK parts were outweighed by annoyances: the poor journalism (often evident in news stories where you know something about the topic), the news priorities (geared towards the sensational rather than the important), the columnists, the sport, the non-news articles…
All of these frustrations meant I resented buying a lump of paper to read the news. And I find news websites too awkward and slow to browse quickly enough to find the good stuff and filter out the bad.
I haven’t found a news publication of any kind that I want to consume as much as I want to, say, watch The Daily Show or read the London Review of Books’ current affairs articles. Maybe there’s something that I’ve missed (please do suggest likely candidates).
But moaning about this over and over again doesn’t do any good. It doesn’t help me know what’s happening in the world. So I’ve decided to spend some time working on this to, hopefully, suggest a solution or, at least, understand the problem better.
More of which, soon.
In Misc on 26 January 2010. 2 comments. Permalink