Now I start sharing chapters from the second part of Geeks Bearing Gifts: Imagining New Futures for News. In the first, I reimagined the relationship journalism has with the public it serves. In the second part, I examine new forms journalism can take. (In the third, I’ll get to the sexy part: business.) The entire book is being posted to Medium, chapter by chapter, here. In this chapter, I deconstruct the article and let links put it back together again. You can read the entire chapter here. The opening:
I come not to bury the article but to praise it. Machined to near-perfection over a century of production, the article is ideally suited to its form. It has developed a well-defined role for each of its elements: lede imparting the latest — the news; nut graph delivering the essence of the story and telling us why we should bother to read the rest; background graph bringing us up to speed; timelines and catalogues of issues and players to set the stage; explanations to give context; quotes from various perspectives; and as many anecdotes and examples as fit in print. All this is prioritized so readers can easily navigate through and extract information and so typesetters in newspaper composing rooms with scarce time and limited space could lop off lines of type at the bottom of a story — bars of molded lead — without losing the essence of it. This is our inverted pyramid. It is the form we teach in journalism school, and with it the skills of summary and abstraction (what is the story? — perhaps the most difficult skill a journalist learns), of evidence and example, of completeness and fairness, of narrative and engagement, of prioritization and news judgment. This is the form that envelops the essential logic of journalism: that any event, issue, battle, or person can be packaged and delivered in so many lines of type. That is what we do.
Given the gifts of geeks with many new media technologies, we’ve enhanced the digital article, adding not just photos but slideshows, and not just slideshows but video and audio. We’ve added explanatory visualizations and graphics that move and interact with readers’ commands. We’ve curated related links to give readers more from our own archives or from anywhere on the web. For good and ill, we’ve added comments. The article is enhanced, improved, updated.
But now let’s deconstruct the article into its core assets. Let’s unbundle its elements just as news publications themselves have been unbundled. Draw that inverted pyramid and its constituent elements and then imagine each as a separate entity in its optimal form. . . .
Read the rest of each chapter here. If you can’t wait for the rest, then you can buy the book here. The perfect gift for the journowonk on your list.
Image from Daily Writing Tips.
