A compelling vision of where media is going

[cartoon courtesy Geek and Poke]

Jeff Jarvis is one of my favorite bloggers. As I follow closely how media is evolving, I often turn to the ideas he conveys. His latest post the other day was extremely relevant given the extraordinarily multithreaded and second-to-second news cycle created by the events over the last month.

It was interesting to me that the media itself received a piece of the blame pie for the financial meltdown, with critics stating that it failed to inform the public effectively as to what happened leading up to the point we're at now. There is some truth to this, and I think that Jarvis is right on as to the reason why.

The old building block of journalism — the article — is proving to be inadequate in the current onslaught of news. I’ll argue here that the new building block is the topic.

The story was all we had before — it’s what would fit onto a newspaper page or into a broadcast show. But a discrete and serial series of articles over days cannot adequately cover the complex stories going on now nor can they properly inform the public. There’s too much repetition. Too little explanation. The knowledge is not cumulative. Each instance is necessarily shallow. And when more big stories come — as they have lately! — in scarce time and space and with scarce resources, each becomes even shallower. We never catch up, we never get smarter. Articles perpetuate a Ground Hog Day kind of journalism.

I think this is a truism that applies to most of the big topics we're seeing in the news, whether it is the bailout/rescue plan, lipstick on a pig, Sarah Palin's latest interview or -- related to our industry -- cloud computing.

Where Jarvis believes journalism needs to go blends social media, crowdsourcing and the Web in general into a virtual place that some call a "topic table" or "community memory."

Instead, I want a page, a site, a thing that is created, curated, edited, and discussed. It’s a blog that treats a topic as an ongoing and cumulative process of learning, digging, correcting, asking, answering. It’s also a wiki that keeps a snapshot of the latest knowledge and background. It’s an aggregator that provides annotated links to experts, coverage, opinion, perspective, source material. It’s a discussion that doesn’t just blather but that tries to accomplish something (an extension of an article like this one that asks what options there are to bailout a bailout). It’s collaborative and distributed and open but organized.

I'd like to see this too, but I think journalism already is headed in that direction, as local media organizations have started wikis and numerous media properties have created social networks. What comes closest to this vision now is BusinessWeek's (relatively) new Business Exchange, which allows new topics to be proposed around which such a "topic table" forms. For example, one topic is IT, and the Business Exchange allows the BusinessWeek community members to submit links to blog posts on the topics, pulls in news stories, and provides pointers to discussion forums on the topic. It appears to be "curated" by BusinessWeek editors at the same time.

Have you seen other examples of this?