The Internet Could Pwn Newspapers (if it wanted to)

Matt Thompson at Newsless.org wrote a pretty great article about what’s missing from the news today. He claims a typical news story consists of four essential parts, three of which are withheld from the reader. A brief summary:

What we get:

• What just happened – This is what you would expect, the who, what, when, why, etc. of a standard news article. Just the facts, ma’am.

What we don’t get:

• The longstanding facts – This is the background information that informs the uninformed on a complex topic with important, relevant history. Matt uses the recent ongoing health care reform effort as an example, describing how what we get are stories about what has happened very recently, but what we’re not getting is how past actions around this effort (including previous major reforms) have shaped the dialogue we’re having now.
• How journalists know what they know – The methods by which a journalist comes to learn about a story can be just as informative, taken in context, as the actual story itself. It can speak to credibility as well as make the presentation of the story more engaging than a strict recitation of facts.
• The things we don’t know – There is a tendency to shy away from acknowledging the unknowns of a story. Standard journalism is all about “this is what we know”, but there is value in understanding what we don’t know and why we don’t know it.

It’s a pretty fascinating article, chock full of references and links to examples supporting Thompson’s notions, and while it didn’t necessarily come right out and say it, the implication is that those parts we don’t get would be perfectly at home online. Wikipedia, or something more vetted if you prefer, is able to provide that concise backstory and history, “the longstanding facts”. Free of the physical demands of space and size with newspaper publishing, journalists could embrace an online format that allows them to expand on their stories, adding to them as new information emerges.

Personally, I rarely read a newspaper. I’d say almost exclusively my news intake comes from online sources. Most of those sources, though, generally just use traditional journalistic methods. I’d love to see a site fully incorporate the 3 missing parts Thompson described.

I might even pay money to read it.