Making information valuable
Journalists write stories. Most stories are intended to convey information. The strategic thinking that should be the next step — who needs this information, how might they act on it, how will they find it, how will they share it, how is it useful to them? — gets little attention in most newsrooms. This piece of the information circuit isn’t built into the journalistic process. Journalists find information, package it, distribute it. End of story. I’m not talking about “news you can use” in a consumer sense. It’s about thinking through much more intelligently the value of the information we spend time collecting and distributing. It’s the ‘value-added’ aspect of information manufacture that is lacking in most local newsrooms.
Gerry McGovern has an insightful column today about the nature of information on most Web sites. His point applies equally to journalism-as-information:
Many organizations have a strange attitude towards information. Its creation is nearly always disassociated from its use. Information is rarely seen as useful or purposeful. It’s just there because people need it. It doesn’t help you do things. It’s simply there for you to read just in case you need some information.
The fact that you need to read some information has no connection with the fact that you need to do something. Information gets created for information-purposes only. No liability. No accountability. And the job of the people who created the information is finished once they have created it. They are not even responsible for its findability. Saying it’s up on the Web is enough.
Most journalists equate “doing something” with advocacy. It’s not objective. It’s too much like public relations. It smells bad.
Yet, disconnected information packaged in random bits no longer serves the function it once did, when information was scarce. Now it just adds to the noise. Jay Rosen spoke to this in a recent chat on Poynter. He said:
The most important thing for establishing credibility is to learn how to be useful and truthful — intellectually honest — for a “live” group of people, a user community. Anything that teaches you how to be useful and truthful for a community of active users is helping you become a better journalist.
ADDENDUM: Vin Crosbie, Digital Deliverance, professor, thinker, writes about The Greatest Change in Media Made Newspapers Obsolete:
The greatest change has been that people’s access to media has changed from scarcity to surfeit. It’s an even bigger change than Gutenberg’s invention of a practical printing press, the invention of writing, or even the first Neolithic cave paintings. It’s the greatest change in all of media history. And it occurred in only 35 years — half a human lifespan.
and…
If the unprecedented change in the balance of Supply & Demand for information — from scarce supply to surfeit supply or even information overload — is the root cause of the problems that media industries now face, how does the root cause contain materials from which comprehensive solutions can be constructed?
The solutions lay in understanding how this change affects pricing, packaging, the power balance between content providers and consumers, and even subjects such as what is local or what is community.
Part of the implications of this change, as many others have pointed out, is that helping people navigate through a flood of information is vastly different than dumping scarce bottles of information in the town square during a drought. In a drought, any water will do. People will find you and they will pay a premium. In a flood, only clean, well bottled water delivered to where you are matters.
We are just now figuring out that we have to make the information/journalism we deliver intensely useful, meaningful, shareable in ways that we’ve never had to think about. If we figure out how to deliver clean, safe water, well organized, right when and where people most need it, a business model will emerge. We have to attend to our product, services, and value in this vastly different context. Then we will survive.
Interesting post, Donica. The question of information wanting to be free, or valuable, was probably first posed by Stewart Brand back in 1984, and has been a topic of discussion ever since. It seems to me that in order to understand how to make information more valuable, it’s important to understand where we are on the technology curve. And what we’ve seen on the web has been a transition from portals, then into search engines, and now heading into a semantic web. Eventually there will be some advanced level of Artificial Intelligence. That the transitions haven’t happened sooner is because the semantic and AI parts are much harder to do than anyone anticipated.
To get an idea of what’s out there now, here are a couple of links:
Open Calais – http://www.opencalais.com/
This is a Reuters project, fairly far advanced, which allows for semantic tagging based on existing common ontologies. Using such semantics means that machines can understand what content is about, which makes the content more valuable because it can become easier to find in the context you’re after.
Intelligent Software Assistants – http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/22117/
This is a recent story by MIT’s Technology Review in which it named the Top 10 emerging technologies. Most of the heavy lifting for one of these, Siri, was done for the Department of Defense and is designed to base information retrieval on what’s appropriate for a particular task.
It also seems to me that one of the bigger issues going on with the journalism community is that a large portion of journalists tend to be consumers of technology and not part of the process of implementing what’s emerging. We use Twitter to ask questions, or Facebook to find sources, and write our stories but don’t spend much time thinking about how best to channel our stories to the people who want or need to know what we write about. Not just today, but also in the future when someone may be hunting for a package of related information and needs not only the now of the thing but also fast retrieval of deeper background, for example.