The Convoluted Life Cycle of a News Story

ideonexus writes "Once upon a time, newspapers were considered the "first draft of history." Today, rather than the daily episodic updates of major news stories developing a narrative over time, we have a perpetual stream of factoids from which a story emerges. Lauren Rabaino of mediabistro details this new lifecycle of a newspaper story, from tweets to blog posts to an eventual print edition, and asks What are the best standards of practice? Should news sources provide a single web address with a stream of updates, post new blog entries that link to older ones, or should they adopt a Wiki approach to the news — revising a single story with a history of revisions available behind the scenes?"

Comments

Example of How Not to Do It

[ideonexus]

I couldn't figure out a way to fit it into the summary, but I was bothered by the way Reuters recently handled their story claiming George Soros was funding Occupy Wall Street (OWS), first running a headline claiming a connection but with a story that offered very spurious evidence of monetary support for the movement, and then taking that story down under heavy criticism from other news sources and reposting the exact same story with a headline absolving Soros of any connection to OWS with a new link, while simultaneously killing the link to the old story without any explanation.

It was extremely problematic for people debating online, as my conservative friends suddenly had their link go dead, while my liberal friends suddenly had the same story but with a headline supporting their position. It was the same exact story, but since nobody RTFAs, the headline was the most important piece of evidence in the debate.

I post this example, not to dredge up some off-topic flamewar about OWS, but because it seems like a pretty clear cut case of how we don't want news agencies operating. I read a comment on Slashdot recently that the reason we aren't allowed to modify our comments is to prevent users from editing out things in order to accuse others of strawman attacks. If you screw up a fact, you post a correction. It seems News Organizations owe us the same courtesy.

Re:Example of How Not to Do It

[Ethanol-fueled]

It was extremely problematic for people debating online...conservative friends...liberal friends.... It was the same exact story, but since nobody RTFAs, the headline was the most important piece of evidence in the debate.

Oh, yeah, "debating" online. A "debate" implies that all parties have at least some background information and are capable of critical thinking and intelligent discussion.

What you described in that case is just parroting. Like parrots, the two sides just repeat sound bites heard from people they happen to agree with. Liberals are all lazy homosexual communists, because Rush Limbaugh said so. Conservatives are dumb, cruel, racist Nazis because Keith Olbermann said so.

Parrots are the cause of America's inability to fix its own problems, especially when turned loose at the ballot box.

I have a novel idea.

[masternerdguy]

How about actually reporting the truth instead of slanting it to the political leaning of your respective audience?

Re:I have a novel idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

How about actually reporting the truth instead of slanting it to the political leaning of your respective audience?

Wouldn't work. There's no money in truth, but there's plenty in "truth".

Re:I have a novel idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have bad news for you: That's actually really physically impossible.

First of all, since there is no "absolute truth". Terms, words, sentences and memes/concepts mean something slightly different for everyone of us. Which is based on our own experiences. For example, somebody living in any of the five towns called "Paris" in the US might think of his "Paris" first, before considering the one in France. And this is a mild example. Every story contains loads of such context-sensitive vague memes. And most of the context is not in the story, but assumed. Put a story Texan about the mayor of "Paris" into a French newspaper, change nothing, and it means something completely different.

Second of all, our senses themselves introduce a huge bias because of their filtering and processing. And our brains themselves are nothing bug huge bias machines. They literally process only differences from normal. Which means bias from neutral. In other words: Perfectly neutral input cannot even be processed, since it by definition causes no changes whatsoever in the neurons.

And as if that were not enough, spacetime is relative to. So your time might not be my time. Your "before" might be my "after". And your '20 miles left from me' is not mine anyway. There simply are no absolutes in our daily lives, even when there may be some in the universe.

I've had countless discussions, and countless very sceptical discussion partners, and so the mere thought of "OMGTEHTRUTHXORZ!!!1one" or "neutral unbiased reporting", is unscientific and delusional nonsense.
It only makes you blind for your own personal bias and expected bias.

The right way to approach this, is do accept that everything has a bias, and know that the more somebody says he doesn't have one, the more he is just is a egocentric dickwad who is blind to his own bias relative to other people.
Because when the bias is known, one has a chance to correct for it. If it is not known, that's not the case.

Choose wisely. :)

Yo dog...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I've heard that those crazy neckbeards over in comp-sci solved the problem of how to manage, timestamp, and attribute revisions to a complex file or group of files that can be expected to be revised over time according to new information, requirements, or refinements. And solved it bloody decades ago. Revision control, people, it isn't just for sourcecode.

Combine that with some of the newer and more www/browser friendly automated merge-and-pretty-print stuff, it should be architecturally trivial to provide a stable URL for a story, a full revision history(including times and who made the revisions), along with related stories, the ability to track revision activity of specific comitters, etc, etc.

I enjoy a good bit of handwaving about how to "best" express complex structures within the limitations of obsolete formats as much as the next guy, and quite possibly more; but it just seems so pointless in this case: There isn't any need to cram the entire sausage-factory of news production into a few square inches of ink-on-dead-tree, so lots of nuanced bloviation on how to do that is just a lot of fluff over a toy problem(nothing wrong with toy problems, as a hobby; but they are a distraction if you are supposed to actually be working...)

If the process is complex, involves multiple inputs over time, from multiple people, then it is indeed impossible to cram without some loss of fidelity into a single static text lump. We could either wring our hands over what transform algorithm is most 'true', or we could just stop fucking around and use a format actually designed to capture something structured that way. This doesn't seem like a difficult decision.

News Via Wiki?

[Cbs228]

I seem to recall another civilization where news stories were subject to constant, behind-the-scenes revisions. I read about it in a book. One must always take care to interpret the past correctly, through the darkly-tinted lenses of our current social and political mindset. After all, it would simply be unsettling if there were anything at all in our history that happened to be politically insensitive or inconvenient for our current religious, economic, or secular leadership. Simply revising or "reinterpreting" key facts and events go a long way towards removing all of that troubling cognitive dissonance; such dissonance could cause people to question the way things are right now. Sadly, I can't really remember any more details about this civilization, because my e-books retailer erased every copy of it.

News via Wiki? I don't think so.

Accuracy, Not Infotainverts

[Doc Ruby]

The best practice of a newspaper is for a reporter who understands the events to find the actual facts about the events, and tell them in a story that is accurate to those facts in terms the readers understand.

No news is made this way. Which is why nobody treats the news as anything but propaganda, whether they like their propaganda or not. All we've got is infotainverts.

Re:A Press Release Is Written

[Anonymous Coward]

From my experience of the media (working on government events), I was shocked at just quite how bad it is. A great many reporters really do not bother to check the facts of what it is that they're reporting on, and instead ask each other instead of going to the bloody event 200 metres away, which they have access to, and are meant to go to from the press area which they're already in.
Myself and my coworkers had a good laugh at the press reports throughout the day, and those printed afterwards, comparing them to the events which we saw and experienced. It was after that, I started taking all news reports with a mine of salt.
As for the press releases from different interests, they're even worse.