Three New Models for Journalism

Felix Salmon's blog from a couple days ago looks at three new journalistic endeavors. Each new venture is spearheaded by someone who is already a "name" in Internet journalism and each has a different idea about how to make this kind of business work in the 21st century.

Salmon points out that each of these attempts is "highbrow" by which he means variously that the journalists are taking their work seriously, all have pretty high price tags, and come with high ambitions. It will be interesting to see which of them is able to make it.

Like Salmon I am most excited about Ezra Klein's attempt to do a more networked, more comprehensive, and less time-dictated version of journalism. For a long time the wisdom has been that news has to be "new" and that electronic media would win because it is faster at delivering the latest new thing. Even broadcast television has its news timeslots and 24-hour news channels have schedules to follow.

But maybe news isn't about newness so much as it is about comprehension and understanding. Another thing the net and electronic media are good at is providing comprehensive - some would say overwhelming - amounts of data. That can take the form of a firehose - just search for a common problem like "my cat pees on the carpet" to see how many different answers you can get, not to mention people wanting to sell you products to solve your problem. Or it can take the form of a collaborative answer. This week I remembered the Challenger disaster and found that Wikipedia has a really detailed and thorough page on the event.

These things both have their uses as well as weaknesses and what Klein seems to be proposing is some of the best of both. He wants a site where incremental updates on developing stories are folded into a larger, more comprehensive, and more explanatory whole. This is an idea that I've seen bounced around since people like Ted Nelson first started talking about using hypertext for news, something I heard from him in 1986 or '87. If Klein can make it work that will be a real advance, in my opinion.