Wordblog

This week I find Jeff Jarvis, in his Guardian column,  is articulating one of the issues that has been bouncing around in my mind for the past couple of months. It is about journalism’s basic form, the story, and how it is proving inadequate.

I have been developing plans for a local news site so have been looking at the issue from a different angle. Mine is how to provide the reader with an overall view of a topic from a fragmented collection of posts by contributors (citizen journalists, if you must), media release, comments from participants, comments from the informed and uninformed, external inks and more.

Jeff uses the financial crisis at his example of a story/topic that requires a “next generation” approach. I have been thinking about much more local topics like a big development proposal. Very different in scale, but the basic needs are similar.

He describes what he wants:

I want a page, a site, a something that is created, curated, edited and discussed. It will include articles. But it’s also a blog that treats a topic as an ongoing and cumulative process of learning, digging, correcting, asking, answering. It’s a wiki that keeps a snapshot of the latest knowledge and background. It’s an aggregator that provides curated and annotated links to experts, coverage from elsewhere, a mix of opinion and source material. Finally, it’s a discussion that doesn’t just blather but tries to add value. It’s collaborative and distributed and open but organised.

That sounds about right although providing that curating and editing is going to be more difficult on a largely volunteer site than it would be a well-funded mainstream media site.

That takes us back to the fundamental questions of generating sufficient funding for a local news and information site.

Jeff concludes:

It’s not an article, a story, a section, a bureau, a paper, a show, a search engine. It’s something new. What do we call it? The topic table? The beat bliki (ouch)? The news brain? I don’t know. We’ll know what to call it when we see it.

I hope we see it soon.