association-list

The life­time of a news story (US pol­i­tics bias):

1. Incep­tion: Cov­er­age here should focus on back­ground, on giving the reader the infor­ma­tion that they need to ini­tial posi­tion them­selves on the issue, and any impli­ca­tions that are clear from the outset. There is room here for sev­eral lengthy arti­cles fram­ing the issue from dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives, pro­vid­ing con­text (at least some of it hope­fully stripped of biases), iden­ti­fy­ing the play­ers and the inter­ested parties.
2. Devel­op­ment: Here we have the bulk of the cur­rent cov­er­age. Almost any­thing labeled ‘break­ing news’ is going to fall into this cat­e­gory. Rever­sals, defec­tions, pol­i­tick­ing, com­pro­mises, & etc.. I don’t think that this was the case twenty years ago. Clearly, a lot of the bloat has been added to fit the require­ments of the so-​​called 24 hour news cycle, and also post require­ments for pro­fes­sional blog­gers. In some ways, it’s good, since you’re able, if say fol­low­ing an expert blog­ger like Ezra Klein, to follow an issue in minute detail, more or less as it hap­pens (give or take a day). The down­side is that the time-​​scales at which Amer­i­can pol­i­tics works are mostly too long for this sort of as-​​it-​​happens cov­er­age. It’s numb­ing and exhaust­ing, both for the reader and, I imag­ine, the writer. I imag­ine that it needs to be done and that for most large issues, this sort of from-​​the-​​ground doc­u­men­ta­tion will be invalu­able for historians.
3. Res­o­lu­tion: Once the dust has set­tled, there’s a need for arti­cles to sum­ma­rize the his­tory of the issue, explain the dynam­ics of the battle and who the key play­ers turned out to be. Again, sev­eral in-​​depth arti­cles are good thing here, as we need the per­spec­tives of both the win­ners and the losers. For those who’re activist inclined, there will always exist places to take more action, and these should be detailed. For wonks, there will be weak­nesses, and these will need some analy­sis so that people can think about how best to shore them up.

Mostly I’m writ­ing this because I find it rough to keep up with cur­rent events. I do an OK job, and like to think that I’m better informed than most on the issues of the day. That said, the con­stant need for con­tent is slowly wear­ing me down, because I need to at least glance at it to dis­miss it. So I end up look­ing at some­thing like 60 news items a day, at least 20 of them fairly sub­stan­tive. I’m for­ever behind, and not having inter­net on the week­ends is really giving me trou­ble on Mon­days. Although that will even­tu­ally be reme­died, I still have better things to do with my week­ends than keep­ing up with the inter­net. It’s clear, of course, that blogs and RSS aren’t the answer, in the long run, but I am strug­gling to come up with some­thing, as a soft­ware person, that makes the making-​​news process both easy to follow and easy to understand.

The app that I am think­ing of works some­thing like this (cap­i­tal­ized words define soft­ware objects that have a vis­i­ble expres­sion in the system): At any one time, there are some number of Issues open. Each issue has one or more Mod­er­a­tors, who may or may not be assigned a Per­spec­tive. An Issue is a mono­lithic col­lec­tion of text and links (text is quotes and prose from the Mod­er­a­tor). A User has a per­sonal feed, and sub­scribes to Issues indi­vid­u­ally on the site (kind of like fol­low­ing some­one on twit­ter). Also included in their feed are announce­ments about new Issues being opened and their Mod­er­a­tors, and also Issues that they don’t follow which have had major changes in the last week. When an issue is updated, people who follow it get an update, which con­tains the sec­tions that were updated and some con­text (may need to be some clever soft­ware here). Simple edits like typo cor­rec­tions wouldn’t update peo­ples feeds, but there would be a strict size limit to this sort of thing, erring on the side of annoy­ing the user in the pur­suit of trans­parency. All Issues would have a full his­tory avail­able at any time. You could choose daily or weekly sum­maries, but my thoughts here are admit­tedly unclear. There would have to be a way for the Mod­er­a­tor to set the urgency of the change (horse-​​race vs. sub­stan­tive devel­op­ment? How do you draw the line there?).

Of course, there’s only so much one can do with soft­ware in the pur­suit of clar­ity and con­ci­sion of accu­rate cov­er­age. Even­tu­ally, some cov­er­age norms would need to be devel­oped that make the form easier to follow and under­stand. I am not sure what these would be. Nor do I under­stand the role that com­ments would play in a system like this (I’m gen­er­ally unhappy with com­ments as they stand now, but that’s another post). Some­thing to think about in the future.