New media

If you are reading a newspaper article online then, in most cases, it will either be:

A) an article that has been edited to fit the physical page and not the Web site you're looking at; or

B) an article that has not been edited.

Let's consider Category A first. The space constraints of the printed page do not exist online. It would seem, then, that stories that have been trimmed (or hacked) to fit into a cramped print news hole ought to be posted to the Web in their entirety. The problem is there's no system for this, no method for editing stories in this way. And the oddity of posting cut-to-fit stories online is just a trivial side effect.

The editorial process of daily newspapers -- developed and refined over more than a century -- is designed to edit stories for a single platform: the print edition. This is the only editorial process most newspapers have. Over the past dozen or so years, almost all newspapers have added new, online publishing platforms, but they have not added any new editorial systems, or even made significant changes to the existing one.

So the print edition is, for nearly all newspapers, the only edited edition. Thus the only way to provide online stories that have been edited is to rip them from the pages of the print edition.*

The editorial process for a daily newspaper is, of course, a daily process. It is a 24-hour cycle designed around a series of deadlines all stemming from the kid on a bike who tosses the newspaper onto the most geographically distant subscriber's lawn porch. If subscribers have been assured that the paper will be there by 7 a.m., then the kid with the bike needs to get the paper by 6 a.m., which means the guy with the truck who gets the paper to the kid with the bike will need to get the paper by ... etc. It's really a rather marvelous feat, accomplishing this logistical miracle every day, day after day, 365 days a year.**

The Web, however, is not based on a similar 24-hour cycle. Both newspapers and their online readers grew dissatisfied with "online editions" that updated once a day, like the pages of a calendar. So now most papers (that word is telling) have begun posting regular updates throughout the day. Stories are posted before they appear in the print edition, which is to say, before they have been through the paper's editorial process. Hence the proliferation of stories from Category B.

I should note here that these Category B stories tend, eventually, to be replaced by their edited versions (usually late at night, after the print edition goes to press). This tends sometimes to produce conspiratorial misinterpretations suspecting some kind of Orwellian sleight of hand. The explanation is nothing quite so malevolent, but rather something that may actually be worse: the original, Category B story was posted before it was edited. It was read, quickly, by the person who typed it and, if time allowed, which it probably didn't, by one other person.

The discrepancy between the two versions of the story is the result of this awkward transitional period in newspapers' entry into the online world. They've met one challenge by developing systems (or, at least, ad hoc methods) for producing online content more quickly than the old 24-hour cycle. But they haven't yet met -- or even really begun thinking about -- the challenge of how to edit all of this content as quickly as they can create and post it. That's a big problem. Every paper's stated goal is that their online content should meet the same standards as the print edition, but there is no structure in place to reasonably consider this a credible expectation.

Newspapers now have a two-platform publishing structure: print and online. Yet newspapers still only have a one-platform editing structure: print. Some few newspapers have responded to this problem by beginning to create an editorial system for their online content that parallels the system in place for their print content. That might be better than nothing but, in an era of ever-shrinking newsrooms, this seems likely to result in an already overworked and nearly overwhelmed copy desk being divided into two, smaller, thoroughly overwhelmed copy desks. I don't think that is where the future lies.

The future, I think, requires a larger but more nimble cross-platform copy desk -- an editorial structure and infrastructure not strictly tied to any single platform. All content -- stories, columns, photos, weather and wire service items -- would flow through it and be edited for accuracy, style, grammar and spelling, emphasis, relevance, etc., so that it was ready for public consumption in whatever platform is available, whether that be print, online, multimedia, town crier or interpretive dance. Some editing would still be required at the point of publication as the otherwise-ready-to-go content is shaped to fit the form and space of the various platforms, and I'm sure it will take quite a bit of experimentation to figure out how to balance that work with the cross-platform work. But I also think it's well past time newspapers began experimenting along those lines.***

Our ad hoc, awkward transitional period is starting to look, as John Kerry might say, like a rather permanent concept.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

* This is, of course, not a very efficient process. Turning pixels into ink and back into pixels is not the shortest distance between two points. It involves an over-promising and under-delivering piece of software called a CMS that converts the stories from laid-out pages into their component pieces and imports them into a database. The templates on the paper's site then pull these component pieces out of the database and into the story templates and voila!

Except not so much with the voila. In reality this process works about as well as Jeff Goldblum's transporter in The Fly.

Part of the problem is that CMS software is premised on the notion of error-free human input, in this case requiring reporters and page designers to ensure that the work they do for human readers is also meticulously coded so that it can be read by an extremely fastidious nonhuman reader -- the CMS. What could possibly go wrong?

What all this means is that the parts of most stories still have to be sorted and reassembled a bit by an actual human type person. That human winds up doing quite a bit of cutting-and-pasting, not to mention a good bit of retyping. All of which means that the edited stories from the print edition will be substantially altered but not substantially re-edited by more than one set of eyes on their way to the Web. So, really, Category A stories can't be considered edited versions either.

** Seriously. The Post Office loves to brag about the whole "neither snow, nor sleet, nor hail" business, but they take Sundays and holidays off. Wimps.

I've mentioned before my favorite example of how this daily miracle gets taken for granted: in the final moments of the (awful) Resident Evil movie, as Milla Jovovich walks the abandoned streets of the city, a newspaper flutters by with the headline "The Dead Walk." The assumption, apparently, is that even if everyone else has fled or been eaten by zombies, the newspaper will still be written, edited, printed and delivered, on deadline.

In the real world, The Times-Picayune went without a print edition for a bit during Hurricane Katrina, but they never stopped publishing online -- prompting their sweetly boastful T-shirt slogan, "We publish come Hell and high water."

*** What ultimately prompts this may turn out to be a court-imposed financial incentive. Copy desks don't just correct grammar and spelling, they also vigilantly protect against libel. It's only a matter of time before, somewhere, some paper posts a Category B story that contains something libelous and, therefore, costly.

Comments

[the opoponax]

you know what i'd really like to see, and what is more of a priority for me than up-to-the-minute newspaper website updates?

wikified news articles. i mean, wouldn't it be fantastic if, on a piece on, say, Bush's judicial appointments, the teensy paragraph that says something like "Critics have accused the Bush administration of attempting to pack the federal courts with conservative judges who conform to the administration's policy opinions." could be peppered with links to the same paper's coverage of same (for instance to an op-ed piece, or previous stories on controversial appointments or situations where a Bush-appointed judge toed the party line in a questionable way). it would even be interesting to see newspapers wikify with other sites, for instance rather than saying "you can find out more on Edwards' platform at his website, www.Edwards4America.com," just link in his name to his campaign site. or even to wikipedia articles or other relatively neutral sources of background information.

of course, this would be too much to ask from the media, who seem to want people to forget as much as possible about anything that may have occurred in a previous news cycle.

[Bugmaster]

I was actually involved in building a very complex CMS; the product itself failed because no one but one specific company needed a CMS that complex. I am actually proud of the work that I did on the project, and let me tell you, building a good CMS is not easy.

However, every modern CMS supports "Workflow" features like the ones Fred is talking about: one person shoots the photos, another writes text, another writes captions and sidebars, and they each can be edited and/or approved individually, with full version tracking and diffs (like Wikipedia). The pieces are assembled into its own article, which has its own editing workflow, and is eventually published. But, this requires a lot of manpower (and a lot of coding on the part of the CMS vendor), so it's overkill for most people... maybe not newspapers, though.

I've never heard of a CMS that requires "error-free" input; that sounds like pure madness to me. Usually, the reporters just write text, and the editors format it.

[Jeff]

just link in his name to his campaign site. or even to wikipedia articles or other relatively neutral sources of background information.

What you're describing sounds more like HTML (linking) tha a wiki, which is a collarorative web-site. This video explains the "wiki" concept pretty clearly.

It would be interesting to see a liberal wiki. Not a "pedia", but a collabortive effort where the various bloggers could update stories based on info and outlooks they have. Could be very fun.

[Stu]

If you want to really be impressed by reporters, there's always the story of the Sarajevo Newspaper that continued printing through the entire war, even after their newspaper office on the road that would eventually be nicknamed "Sniper Alley" was completely destroyed by mortar fire.

The Wikipedia page touches on this a little, but it doesn't begin to cover how awesome and incredible their devotion to a free press was.

[the opoponax]

i think the term "wikify" is pretty widely understood to mean "add explanatory hyperlinks, preferably within-site" these days, Jeff.

from the official wiki-glossary:

Wikify
To format using Wiki markup (as opposed to plain text or HTML) and add internal links to material, incorporating it into the whole of Wikipedia.

[the opoponax]

by the way, that tag is TOTALLY closed, if anyone was wondering.

[emjaybee]

opoponax, we are starting to see a lot of more of that kind of thing, such as this NYTimes City Desk article, chockablock with hot links.

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/manager-insists-kobayashi-is-coming-to-brooklyn/

Frankly, I'm grateful if editors can catch most of the factual errors and spelling errors, given the deadlines they have. All I edit are magazines and books, and that's hard enough.

[Steve]

Fred: Regarding CMS...I'm not understanding this...are you saying the print edition stories are OCR scanned back into a database for the web edition? Why not use the same original file for the print edition and web edition. I'm confused.

Though this would explain one reason that my local paper's website is so hilariously filled with errors. I think its getting a little better, though.

[Bugmaster]

Hmm, I guess I'm old-fashioned. From my perspective, "wikify" still means "open up for public editing". What Fred is talking about is more like cross-linking.

[Steve]

But Opo, they are using Wikify in the context of Wikipedia in that definition...open source is assumed, I believe. If what you are suggesting is simply having the newspaper add more links to articles, then I think the proper term would be "marking up" the article.

I've seen a lot of "auto" marking up...which is silly to me. For example, in an article on John Edwards, it might use the word haircut...which is linked. Instead of that link going to pages about the haircut controversy, it links to a general search on the word "haircut". And that it helpful, how?

[Jeff]

i think the term "wikify" is pretty widely understood to mean "add explanatory hyperlinks, preferably within-site" these days, Jeff.

"To format using Wiki markup (as opposed to plain text or HTML) and add internal links to material, incorporating it into the whole of Wikipedia."

I know I'm being picky here (a pendant? On Slacktivist? Ohnoes!!!!) but those don't sound like the same thing to me. Adding hyperlinks, especially within-site, is a standard feature of HTML -- in fact it comes in two flavors: the top-level anchor and the in-page anchor. Using Wiki mark-up is not standard HTML, but is it's own thing, whether it links to Wikipedia or to off-site sources.

Steve: I find that a lot of the "auto"mark-up seems to be directed toward commercial sites. Click on "haircut" and you'll be directed to SuperCuts, for example. Not helpful to you or me, but very helpful to the commercial sites.

[coriolis]

In defense of the Post Office: Their system doesn't depend on CHILD LABOR.
In defense of the Resident Evil movie: Dude, MILLA JOVOVICH.

[the opoponax]

I'm being picky here (a pendant? On Slacktivist? Ohnoes!!!!)

That would be "pedant". and there should be at least one 11, and preferably the word "eleven" written out, in the "Ohnoes" portion of the parenthetical.

< /pedant>

it's all good, Jeff. after posting that i hopped around and realized that i really had used the word in an unconventional/wrong sense. but you see my meaning, no? and it's a good idea, yes?

btw, i wasn't intending to imply in that original post that the hyperlinks would be liberal in scope. just that it would provide lots of information in a very compact and comprehensive way. which is generally what newspapers like, anyway. though it would, as i said, violate the unwritten maxim that anything written before about 10 days ago in the same paper never happened, sorry, nu-uh, must be your imagination, "we have always been at war with Eastasia Eurasia Eastasia"

[Bugmaster]

My favorite line from the RE movie: "Hmm, it looks like there may be zombies everywhere... Let's split up ! I'll take the basement."

[Steve]

I was going to affirm the idea shared here by others of wiki-type newspaper articles, but in a sense, doesn't wikipedia kind of provide that. See here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dismissal_of_U.S._attorneys_controversy

Instead of reading 1,000 or more news articles, all with the obligatory three paragraph rehash in the middle so you understand the context, you can read this one page that has the whole of the topic, with supporting documentation. Of course, there can be details left out, or slanted, but it seems to be a pretty conprehensive narrative that is regularly updated.

[the opoponax]

@ emjaybee --

i don't think mark-up (new vocabulary word, yay!) would be too much to ask. bloggers do it all the time, especially to cite something or avoid weasel words like "many critics say", or to give information straight-up without waiting to be asked for evidence of something.

and to an extent it's just a question of style, replacing textual mentions that a website exists with a hyperlink to the site. this could be used to especially good effect in situations like the NYT's style pages, where articles often specifically list of products you may be interested in (the shop information, phone number, and website gets cumbersome). it would also be good for reviews, perhaps linking to ticketweb or fandango so that after reading that your favorite theatre critic really liked X, you can proceed directly to ordering tickets. of if hearing that the movie critic you always disagree with hated X, you can proceed directly to ordering tickets.

[logopetria]

Jeff: I think you mean "pedant" :)

[logopetria]

Rats, too slow.

[Jeff]

it's all good, Jeff. after posting that i hopped around and realized that i really had used the word in an unconventional/wrong sense. but you see my meaning, no? and it's a good idea, yes?

No problem. Yes, I got your meaning (which is why I became a necklace for a bit **headdesk**); and yes, it's a good idea.

and to an extent it's just a question of style, replacing textual mentions that a website exists with a hyperlink to the site.

Heck if we can do it here using primitive mark-up [types: a href=" "...], there's no excuse for a newspaper not to.

And..... as long as I've ended a sentence with a preposition, why not go alllllllllll the way?:

"What did you bring that book that I don't want to be read to from out of about Down Under up for?"

[cjmr]

The pendant is actually the dangly bit that hangs from the necklace, not the necklace itself.

/hyper-pedantic prescriptivist

[Jeff]

cjmr: Hisssssssss!!!

[LL]

I kinda like Resident Evil too. Considering it's based on a video game, it certainly could have been a lot worse. I'd like to have that red dress she wears.

RE print vs. web: "Why not use the same original file for the print edition and web edition. I'm confused." Me too. Don't stories start out as Word files anyway? If you have a website for which the text has to be meticulously coded, that's a badly designed website, as far as I can tell. Which would be NOT unusual. There are many badly designed websites, not just poorly designed visually, but poorly designed technically, in ways that make adding text, moving things, correcting things, much much harder than they should be. Sounds like to me Fred's employers have been ripped off by some company who talked them into buying a really expensive system full of all sorts of annoying "functionality" that few people ever use and that makes the few things that people use all the time very difficult to do. Also not unusual.

Given how ignorant most newspaper people seem to be about websites (pathetic, since we're almost a decade into the 21st century), it wouldn't surprise me at all to find out that lots of them approved and paid for systems they didn't understand just because they didn't want to admit they didn't know what the tech people were talking about.

[Bugmaster]

Yeah, what LL said. A real CMS would let you use an Ajaxified WYSIWYG editor, or just upload Word files. In larger organizations, the editor is either required to know the formatting markup (usually HTML) himself, or to employ someone who does; but the individual authors rarely need to understand it.

[PepperjackCandy]

I've seen a lot of "auto" marking up...which is silly to me. For example, in an article on John Edwards, it might use the word haircut...which is linked. Instead of that link going to pages about the haircut controversy, it links to a general search on the word "haircut". And that it helpful, how?

Tell me about it.

My personal favorite? The News Alert feature (mostly on Yahoo!, though I've seen it elsewhere as well).

Like on the story White House, Cheney's office subpoenaed, the "Get an alert when there are new stories about:" choices inclued "Spokane, Wash," because of this sentence:

Gonzales, in Spokane, Wash., on Wednesday to discuss gang issues with local officials, said he had not seen the subpoena documents and could not comment on them directly.

And one of the choices on Egypt says mummy is Queen Hatshepsut is "B.C." And I'm wondering how many articles on British Columbia this is going to pull up.

[Fritz]

Nice essay. I've spent most of my adult life in print journalism - about half before The Internet As We Know It, about half after - and I've spent it as the IT guy at the paper I worked for. I've been singing - howling - the same song since the mid-nineties. And now I'm going to make a double martini, slug it, and go to bed feeling just a bit vindicated.

[mcc]

B) an article that has not been edited.

To be honest, this is actually one of the main reasons I like getting all my news online-- that occasional totally-unedited article that slips through, with all the gory detail left in. I guess though now that you mention it that unedited might also mean not-fact-checked, I'd never really thought of it that way.

[Melkor]

Meh, the reason you won't ever see a direct link to an external site, style section or no, is that newspapers exist to sell your attention and eyeballs to advertisers.

Well, at least from the PoV of the accounting department of the people who own the newspaper. Their business model is essentially selling links (advertising), so there's actually a good business case to made for NOT linking out (aka. Free Advertising) in any story, style section or no. If they want direct links, they can buy an advertorial like anyone else.

Internal links are different - keeping you on-site for one more pageview is that much more advertising the sales department can sell. Which is why you're a lot more likely to see that implemented in a useful fashion.

By the way: those auto-underlined links you're seeing? Yeah, those are a form of contextual advertising, like Google's Adsense except more annoying. They're double-underlined and in green, right? That's IntelliText ads - can't say as I know how Googles version looks; but there is one like it from the big G as well...

[the opoponax]

but Melkor, while i agree with you, this wouldn't preclude them from linking to other stories on the same site, or to using hyperlinks as a style solution rather than listing websites and/or contact info.

also, other websites that sell advertising still manage to use content-related hyperlinking, and the advertisers clearly don't care.

[Bugmaster]

By the way: those auto-underlined links you're seeing? Yeah, those are a form of contextual advertising, like Google's Adsense except more annoying.

AdBlock Plus filters them right out...

[fe_man]

Well, I wanted to love on Wiki.. but everybody has beaten me to it. so I'll try and add one.

check this out: http://www.break.com/index/ridiculously-cool-technology-from-microsoft.html
(sorry I don`t know how to make a hyperlink in these comments, and sorry that there`s a lot of vulgar and stupid humor on break.com, but this video is worth your time)

this technology, combined with wiki mentality (source everything or get stamped with the "does not cite sources" label) could bring a whole new era of objectivity and accountability to journalism. The editor new function could be only to decide which information should be displayed most prominently. All info could be included, both edited and raw for multimedia, with all sources listed.

this would also mean that better journalism would also be slower... and I know that's not good. If we can figure that out, we can start the revolution.

[Melkor]

Mmm, I'm guilty of overstating my case of course. "Won't ever" is a nice rethorical flourish but a poor argument. The claim I should be making is that the business case for not linking offsite without being paid for it creates a very strong incentive for the business side of the newspaper to make it awkward and/or complicated for the end-user journalist to do it in their CMS solution.

The thing is, conflict between newspaper-as-news and newspaper-as-business isn't settled for either the online version or the print edition. The return of the advertorial - advertising disguised as news/reporting - is an example of this. And newspapers are still trying to work out how their online business model can be viable - note the difference between how the NYTimes and the WaPo deal with their archives, for example.

Internal vs. external linking is just one aspect of this - internal links bring more pageviews and are thus a good thing, offsite links is the product that the online version sells and are thus not supposed to be available for free.

Though now I'm beginning to lose track of what my own argument actually is...

[Jeff]

fe man: The code for link is: < a href=" [link] " > [text] < /a >

The TED Conference speech is also here (SFW)

[the opoponax]

"the business case for not linking offsite without being paid for it creates a very strong incentive for the business side of the newspaper to make it awkward and/or complicated for the end-user journalist to do it in their CMS solution."

but, again, a great many other sites which make their money via advertising already do this. check out any of the major blogs. if their sponsors stipulated that they couldn't link to a potential competitor, blogs wouldn't be able to exist because half the point is in linking to other sites (whether as citation or just "check out this thing that exists"). i don't think online advertisement involves that kind of exclusivity. not to mention, of course, that while advertisers have a lot of control over newspapers already, they can't prevent them from mentioning potential competitors. a paper with Coke as a sponsor is not prevented from talking about how a new variation on Pepsi is taking the country by storm, or publishing a feature that waxes nostalgic about Dr. Brown's. every Sunday, the Style Section of the NYT is dripping with ads for Tiffany's and Bloomindale's. Yet their articles feature items available from those stores' competitors every single week. if it was a basic practice of newspaper advertisement that the sponsorship of one company precluded the promotion of a competitor's product, none of this would ever happen.

of course, in the shadier papers, this is, in fact, the case. the NY Post (owned by Newscorp) always swoons over Fox's opening movies and recommends that you tune in to this week's episode of Beauty And The Geek. and over the past few years, major cities have seen the onset of free papers (completely ad-supported), whose articles are about 20% real news to 80% Aren't The Subways Crowded (next to a car ad) and Best Spas In New York (next to an ad for Bliss or something).

[Rich]

Jeff:
It would be interesting to see a liberal wiki.

Based on my experience, a liberal wiki would be a disaster. The Wiki methodology has many things to be said in its favor, but one thing that can be said against it is that it is very vulnerable to fanatics. I know a number of Wiki contributors, and they love to regale me with stories of "tactical voting"* and, a far bigger problem, "edit wars". Both are tools used by fanatics to get their content in to the Wiki. Wikipedia itself doesn't have huge problems with these, because there are not very many people willing to engage in an edit war over, say, "binomial heaps".

A politically defined Wiki, on the other hand, would draw fanatics who will go to any length to get their particular idealogy included as "the one true faith". It would be like drawing moths to a flame (albeit a loving embrassing flame). In short, a "liberal Wiki" would be exactly the Wiki that attracts people who are able and willing to destroy a Wiki. Of course, the same criticisms apply to a conservative Wiki.

* - "tactical voting" is not the term that my Wiki contributor friends use to describe it. They don't have a term to describe it. What I'm talking about is the practice of using "votes to delete" in order to remove articles that disagree with your point of view.

Jeff:
Not a "pedia", but a collabortive effort where the various bloggers could update stories based on info and outlooks they have.

The fact that people would be tempted to update stories based on the outlooks they have is what makes a liberal Wiki so unworkable. Wikis are perhaps the one place where diversity simply does not work. After all, a Wiki takes many different view points and merges them into one, which doesn't leave much room for different outlooks. If you want additional info and different outlooks the place to go would be a forum, or a blog that has a number of different commenters (like this one).

Or perhaps by "outlook" you meant "point of view" or "context", in which case I'm overanalyzing things.

Personally, what I'd like to see is some sort of Google type system, but directed at forums and blog comments. Essentialy I'd like there to be a way of typing in a topic, and immediatly seeing the various discussions on the Web about it, on all areas of the political spectrum. Such a thing would not be trivial to implement, and since forums and blogs don't generally pay for advertisement, would be hard to pay for. Still, it's a nice dream.

[Jeff]

Or perhaps by "outlook" you meant "point of view" or "context", in which case I'm overanalyzing things.

I think point of view is closer to what I meant.

Personally, what I'd like to see is some sort of Google type system, but directed at forums and blog comments. Essentialy I'd like there to be a way of typing in a topic, and immediatly seeing the various discussions on the Web about it, on all areas of the political spectrum.

Blog Report used to be somewhat like this, before it went to Salon. It's not quite as useful as it was, but it's a start.

[Julia]

Hm. Maybe add "part-time web copy-editor" to the list of "dream jobs" a SAHM could have to earn a little extra money? Because I know a number of SAHMs who would be a LOT better at copy-editing than at selling things, which is what a lot of the "part-time extra income" things seem to be based on.

But not edit for length or anything -- just for those weird ambiguous errors that come out, or the poor judgement in punctuation (as was found on the web version of the news story of the train hitting the truck near here recently).

[Melkor]

Like I said Opponax - I'm beginning to lose track of my own argument :)

I think what I'm saying is that some of the awkwardness of CMS'es that Fred notes can be attributed to the people who order and pay for the CMS in question. While journalists may want to link out as freely as bloggers do, the management has little or no incentive for making this an easy process. Thus the awkwardness of linking offsite gets built into the CMS trough the requirments/procurement process - and this means that while the online newspaper doesn't have an actual written policy of "no offsite linking", the process is made awkward enough for the end-users that it's just easier to not link out.

At least that's my best WAG at a rational explanation for the difficulties Fred's observed...

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