One of the most striking parts about the current upheaval in the newspaper business is that business models are profoundly shifting. Sure, the business model of the small weekly is fairly sound when considered next to the major-market daily, but that still doesn’t provide an answer for the internet.
Like an elephant in the room, publishers still don’t really know what they’re doing. The Times and WaPo finally got around to creating a skunkworks-like departments that creates innovative web applications that manipulate data and take advantages of their companies expansive coverage of their regional areas. Still, these things wind up looking like add-ons. And it also doesn’t help explain how solvent but small cash flow weeklies are supposed to take advantage of these things.
When I first began working at a small rural weekly I was asked to do school board interviews. Okay, I thought, where’s the rubric to cover this? What format should the interview be in, and how should I structure my questions? Turns out it was just another narrative-driven story about the interview I had with each candidate. Sometimes it gets wedged into one story, for big positions each interview gets its own story. Yahoo. So what happens when people wonder what was said in the in between?
Journalism is often understood as a process of applying a lens to the topic of coverage, with the idea that a “professional” journalist is as unbiased as possible. But what to do with all that information that is unbiased and just as interesting as narrative to a great many people.
Enter the internet.
I envision a whole “Elections” application separate from the narrative content management system. Sure, you could include the stories that run in the paper, but you could also offer candidates a level platform for publishing their positions, publish every bit of info allowed by public disclosure laws, provide events where candidates are speaking, if they are incumbents it could include their voting record or major accomplishments, past campaign promises and the result at the conclusion of their term.
The point of this exercise is that there is a lot more to an election than a narrative story can provide. There’s data and there’s information. A newspaper, or community information service, needs a comprehensive, usable, and most importantly visible way of presenting all that stuff.
