First, as a civilian who lacks salary-supported info-consumption time, I struggle to get through the never-ending queue of smart/worthwhile/interesting news. And it feels like news soldiers, who do have that time and are otherwise consumed by info consumption, don’t understand that people outside the industry might be like me.

Second, there is also a never-ending queue of pointless/time-suck news, but many news organizations and journalists don’t distinguish worthwhile news from pointless news. (Or industry economics don’t allow them to distinguish the two.)

I’m not talking about TMZ and celebrity gossip. I’m talking about the extremely high percentage of “news” — from the AP, NPR’s daily news shows, tech news orgs, almost every news org that covers politics, etc. — that to the average person is literally trivia, as useful (and useless) to their everyday lives and thoughts as a game of Trivial Pursuit. As a news civilian, I don’t know why I’m supposed to care.

Because news orgs continue to shovel this trivia toward me without explaining why it’s important or rethinking whether they should be producing it, I grow to suspect and resent them and feel less bad about my lack of info-consumption time. Or I continue to waste time on this news  and grow to resent myself. Down that road lies some combination of info-numbness, self-hatred, and a (further) tuned-out citizenry.

Three recent blog posts illustrate my second struggle.

Here’s Brian Lam, in his awesome post about reducing “the overage of technology and noise” in our lives to increase happiness:

I stopped reading the stupid hyped up news stories that are press releases or rants about things that will get fixed in a week. I stopped reading the junk and about the junk that was new, but not good. I stopped reading blogs that write stories like “top 17 photos of awesome clouds by iphone” and “EXCLUSIVE ANGRY BIRDS COMING TO FACEBOOK ON VALENTINES DAY.” And corporate news that only affects the 1%. Most days, I feel like most internet writers and editors are engaging in the kind of vapid conversation you find at parties that is neither enlightening or entertaining, and where everyone is shouting and no one is saying anything. I don’t have time for this.

Ezra Klein, on the “tornado of idiocy that is American politics“:

“Most people don’t care about politics,” [UCLA political scientist Lynn Vavreck] said. “They’re not running around with these preformed opinions in their head. They worry about what they’ll make for dinner and how to get their kids to bed. And that hasn’t changed. For us, that’s an alien world. We think about politics all the time. But we’re not normal. The 24-hour news cycle has not really affected the average American who isn’t into politics. And that’s really important to remember.”

I think most people in Washington believe voters would make better decisions if they spent more time following politics. But I spend a lot of time following politics, and quite often, I couldn’t be happier that voters are tuning out the inanities that obsess this town.

And Om Malik, reflecting on recent news about tech executives changing jobs (via Alexis Madrigal’s awesome essay on app/tech stagnation):

Sure, these are some great people and everyone including me is happy for their new gigs and future success. But when I read these posts and often wonder to myself that have we run out of things to say and write that actually are about technology and the companies behind them? Or do we feel compelled to fill the white space between what matters? Sort of like talk radio?

Something’s percolating here. Can anything be done about it on more than an individual level?

By day, I read dozens of news stories for my job as an editor. By night, I read dozens more for my then-current or assumed-future writing gigs, and for my perpetual gig as deputy assistant knowledge dilettante.

I read 90 percent of the Atlantic, New Republic, and New Yorker issues (front- and middle-of-the-book sections, at least) from 2002 to 2009. I religiously followed Talking Points Memo during the Bush years. Slate, video game blogs, why-am-I-still-reading-this runs of Rolling Stone — anything to fill my professionally and dopaminically mandated info quotas.

But I’m out of the game now. Been out for a couple of years¹. I’m a news civilian. And I am lost.

I don’t know how I’m supposed to behave, news-and-information-wise. I don’t know what my news-consumption obligations are as a civilian, as a citizen, as a typical 2010s creative-classer with moderately long work days and a moderately long daily commute.

I don’t know which kinds of news and information I should be consuming, in which quantities, and at which frequencies. I don’t know what constitutes an appropriate amount of news-consumption time, and when that turns into dawdling and procrastination time. I don’t know what I’m allowed to ignore, and what I should feel bad about ignoring.

So I feel bad when I spend a Saturday morning lost in Techmeme, Twitter, and the remnants of my Google Reader. I feel bad on the many more Saturdays when I don’t do this. I feel bad when I neglect local daily news. I feel bad when I tritely let New Yorkers pile up². I feel bad when my wife (an editor at CQ Roll Call) mentions some congressional to-do I know nothing about. I feel bad when I admit that reading one article does not make me knowledgeable about arc-plasma waste incinerating technology.

Then there are the days when I pick up a Washington Post Express on the Metro or listen to Morning Edition, and I wonder why I’m supposed to care about an apartment explosion in Mexico City or the 179th report of the year from Tahrir Square. The existential chorus chimes in: What’s the point of all this?

Does anyone else feel this way?

Does this stress out other recently civilianed info-people? Do lifelong news civilians think about this stuff?

I can’t believe I’m the only one. The news business’s grinding relentlessness – an unfathomably full Economist and New Yorker every single week;  a multi-sectioned newspaper on your doorstep every single day; a mix-metaphored river of news flowing thru yr interntz every single second — sends a pretty definitive message regarding info-consumption expectations. We’re supposed to be information hoarders.

The industry’s recent product innovations have done nothing to change this expectation. Zite, Flipboard, Trove — so many products ostensibly meant to help us manage the river of news. The pitch: Wouldn’t it be great if your news river contained only info-flotsam that interests you?³ Wouldn’t it be great if your news river was clean and picturesque?

Sure — go for it, news-river-management product creators. But frankly, those aren’t my biggest news-consumption problems. I have zero problem finding news that interests me. I bet most moderately web-savvy people younger than 60 can easily find news that interests them.

And while it’s nice to see shared links displayed in an aesthetically pleasing manner, you know what kind of news product I really want? One that adds two hours to my day so I can read all of that perfectly targeted news.

I don’t know if the news business intentionally conditions civilians to be info hoarders. Online news economics certainly call for the “Have all the donuts in the world!” approach to news delivery, in order to garner the requisite page views and time on site. But it may be simpler than that.

News soldiers are information hoarders living and working among other information hoarders. They see info hoarding as the ideal and indeed only appropriate level of news consumption. So they expect the rest of us to consume news in the same way — if they ever stop to consider that there is a “rest of us” in the first place.

Now what are the civilians supposed to do?

–

¹Technically I was still part of the news universe through 2010, but my last year-plus at Publish2 revolved around product management and 14-hour startup days rather than around news consumption.

²I still read every Atlantic and Wired, though. Monthly magazines are so much easier to manage.

³I’ve never been sure whether the news in the “river of news” metaphor is the water itself, or the stuff swimming in/floating on the water.

I’ve been thinking about this since reading (*cough* back in the spring *cough*) Martin Langeveld’s vision of how content will flow in future newsrooms, and Matt Thompson’s imagining the difficulties of implementing the alternative workflows such “content cascades” will require.

Start with Martin’s notion of content flow in a digital newsroom:

The content cascade starts with raw information. It can be anything: reporter-gathered data, citizen journo input, crowd-sourced information, audio, video, press releases, government data and reports, industry data. … [I]n a digital newsroom, it can be digitally archived and organized, and much of it can be made available online to readers interested in digging into it. …

At the next level in the content cascade model, significance is extracted from content — facts, background, comments and opinions are pulled into traditional “stories” as well as being analyzed, compared, questioned, evaluated, refuted, corrected, updated and otherwise spun and massaged. This happens in editorials, columns, blog posts, blog comments, Tweets, social network interactions, collaborative work by newsroom teams, and, not least of all, in actual conversations at the proverbial dinner tables, water coolers and bus stops, and even in old-fashioned letters to the editor.

Some of this significance extraction will be done by reporters, and some will be done by readers. (Note: “significance extraction” = worst buzzword ever.) Much of it will likely be done by editors.

But if you’re a traditional newspaper editor — who thinks in terms of X number of articles for X pages in X upcoming papers — the content cascade model probably sounds as doable as standing at the mouth of a river and trying to catch two A1 stories in a paper cup. (Note: mixed metaphors definitely intentional).

As Matt puts it:

When people like us talk about being “Web-centric,” we’re telling these editors that their new prerogative is to sift the borderless dumping-grounds of a reporter’s whimsy for shards of insight and curiosity that they might glue together into some recycled wreck of a page.

His post is largely about the structural/logistical/cultural challenges of making this shift, but I’m not sure the shift itself has gotten enough attention.

Of course newspaper editors are already curators in a broad sense: They select which stories, photos, graphics, etc. go in which locations in each section, and guide the process by which those elements are created. But this is a very limited form of curating.

First, story/image selection is often less about deliberate curation and more about puzzle-solving (“How can I fit all the pieces together to make a coherent section/paper?”), hole-filling (“Ohgod, what am I going to use for centerpiece art??”), traditionalism (“Gotta put State of the Union coverage on 1A”), or self-interest (“I really need one of my reporters to have a front-pager this week.”). Think of typical daily budget meetings, where stories are pitched before they’re completed and personal dynamics can have outsized influence on the decision-making.

Second, as Martin points out, the content cascade contains far more than photos and finished stories. And while editors might occasionally ask reporters specific questions about their notes, most editors probably don’t read those notes themselves. They probably don’t read all of their reporters’ Tweets, Facebook messages, and blog posts, or all the resulting comments and responses (on their site and others).

But now we’re seeing that these disparate currents of a news organization’s content stream (note: belabored metaphor grudgingly intentional) engage readers as much as — or more than — the organized arrangement of discrete stories and images on a page.

Consider Andrew Sullivan’s blog and Talking Points Memo.

Throughout the day (and sometimes night) they’re posting original reporting and commentary; links to other important reporting, breaking news, and commentary; entertaining ephemera; comments from readers, often with their own responses; comments from other sites; links to their published work elsewhere; previews of future coverage; Twitter-length thoughts; and engaging photo features.

This is the content cascade model in action. (Keep in mind that all but two of those links are from just two days in the spring.)

Now imagine how much richer a larger news organization’s site — not to mention a newspaper — would be if it tapped into its own cascades this way.

Some news organizations have begun making the shift. The new AnnArbor.com launched with the kind of unusual design that’s effective for presenting content this way: a blog-style, reverse-chronological approach that lacks the visual hierarchy of traditional news sites. As AnnArbor.com’s Tony Dearing told Nieman Journalism Lab:

“In addition to covering news and being a journalistic source, our goal was to be a true community hub,” Dearing said. “Taking a very traditional, hierarchical, top-headlines-of-the-day approach did not feel like it was going to really give people that feel or the breadth of what the site seeks to do, which is reflect the entire community and not just the news.”

Gazette Communications in Iowa seems to be heading in this direction conceptually, in terms of both new approaches to news and new ideas about editors’ roles. (Drop a note in the comments if you know of other news orgs moving in this direction.)

Most newsrooms have this material somewhere. Now they have to figure out how to make those difficult logistical changes that will let them put the content stream to good use.

———

UPDATE: Kevin Sablan has some interesting related thoughts.

As my students remind me, an awful lot of people (in raw numbers) don’t have fast Internet access or even home access at all. Those box scores and op-ed pages take a long time to load via dial-up. And one of the reasons I subscribe to print newspapers is to have the TV listings as a ready reference without having to go online yet again. The L.A. Times recently dropped its weekly TV guide section, and I’m seriously considering dropping my subscription because that was one of the most important resources it gave me that I couldn’t get online – a week’s worth of planning in one shot, whenever I wanted.

This is a perfect illustration of one reason newspapers are so sclerotic. Call it the Niche-Reader Fallacy: Newspapers live in such fear of readers canceling subscriptions if there’s any change to the horoscopes, comics, TV listings, box scores, stock tables, Miss Manners, etc., that they end up hanging on to everything for way too long.

Every paper has its own audience, so there’s no single right answer about what to cut and what to save/rethink (though stock tables come pretty darn close to being an across-the-board no-brainer). But part of this isn’t just “what’s more effective on the Web” — it’s “what’s the best use of increasingly limited print space to give readers news that they can’t get anywhere else?”

So yes, box scores may take time to load — but the average person wouldn’t be going online for results from the Arena Football League, horse racing, dog racing, WNBA, MLS, non-major tennis or golf tournaments, boxing, college baseball, and all the other obscure miscellany that takes up sports sections. The people who care about those things will watch SportsCenter or go online, and the average reader won’t care. Those readers would be better served if that space were used for more local investigations or what have you.

As noted in the post, the typical newspaper response to this is fear of making any changes or deletions because those few people who do care about all the box scores (or stock tables, or comics, etc.) will cancel their subscriptions — just as my brother is thinking about canceling his because of the TV listings. The solution isn’t then to cater to every reader’s niche interests — it’s to convince readers that the paper is worth reading for more than just that niche element. (In other words, leave the long tail to the Web.) If the L.A. Times can’t put out a paper that’s interesting enough to keep my brother’s interest once they drop the TV guide, then they don’t deserve his subscription.

First, Alan Mutter calls out The Oklahoman for wildly overplaying a story about a U.S. Geological Survey project mapping out where burmese pythons could survive in an ever-warmer U.S. The study found that the pythons “could colonize one-third of the USA, from San Francisco across the Southwest, Texas and the South and up north along the Virginia coast,” according to USA Today. The Oklahoman’s story examined the finding that most of Oklahoma is now a possible python habitat, and concluded in the fourth paragraph that

Even though the pythons might find Oklahoma’s weather suitable, local wildlife experts don’t expect to run into any of the massive constrictors any time soon.

Nonetheless, the piece ran as the front-page lead story with a large, two-deck headline reading: “Big snakes could slither into state.”

The story, of course, says no such thing. Mutter asks, “why did the Oklahoman play this non-story in the sensational fashion it did?” I think the answer — besides simple bad editorial judgment — is that papers fear running interesting stories just for the sake of running an interesting story. There has to be some ostensible “news peg” or other timely reason for running the story.

I actually disagree with Mutter that the python study is a non-story. I think there are three interesting stories wrapped up in this: that pythons and other invasive snakes have already taken root in the Florida wilds (remember this amazing/horrifying photo?); that enough people own these kinds of snakes and set enough free that the species are able to establish footholds (or bellyholds) in the wild; and that the U.S. climate is changing enough that it could one day support pythons in the wild in areas outside of the Everglades

Now, you’d need a bit more information to really flesh this out. How many people have burmese pythons, have they been found in the wild anywhere outside of Florida, which of the areas in the U.S.G.S. maps could sustain pythons now vs. which are theoretical habitats but more likely to produce “snake-sickles” (in the words of one skeptical Oklahoma City snake breeder), etc. But I think it’s definitely an interesting story — especially given that the Oklahoman article notes that “[a]t least four Burmese pythons have been surrendered to the Oklahoma City animal shelter in the past four years.” The story could have run farther down the page with a headline like “Don’t set your python free” and a subhed like “The state’s climate could support the large snakes in the wild, study finds” or “State’s climate could support wild pythons, study finds, but breeders are skeptical.” Something along those lines.

Why didn’t they do that? My guess is, because then the story “isn’t news” as news is currently understood. The story, run with an accurate headline, would have provided no timely reason to put it on the front page; there’s nothing “important” about it. But if a new view of news and newspapers took hold — one in which interesting stories get as much play as so-called important or timely ones — readers could have gotten both an interesting article and an accurate headline.

The other blog post that caught my eye was a quick one at The American Scene. Peter Suderman writes:

Here’s what I really want to know (besides, obviously, the whole deal with that giant-foot statue in Lost): Why is More Americans Are Giving Up Golf currently the top story at the New York Times’ website? Aren’t there more exciting things going on in the world?

I’m not familiar enough with Suderman’s writing style to know how tongue-in-cheek this is; he didn’t ask “aren’t there more important things going on,” at least. Either way, the question assumes there’s something wrong-headed about newspaper readers gravitating toward a story they actually find interesting.

I’m not a golfer, and I don’t watch golf except the ends of big tournaments when the TV’s on at work. But the post-Tiger Woods golf boom interested me, and I pay attention here and there. So I was very surprised to read in the Times story that there actually hasn’t been a post-Tiger golf boom:

The total number of people who play has declined or remained flat each year since 2000, dropping to about 26 million from 30 million, according to the National Golf Foundation and the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association.

This may not have the world-historical importance of Kosovo’s independence, Musharraf’s party’s losses in Pakistan, or the presidential election. But it’s not as though the New York Times devoted resources to this golf story to the exclusion of everything else (unlike The Wire’s fictional newsroom, they can cover more than one subject at once). I think it’s great that it was the most popular story on the site — that means non-news junkies are still reading stuff in the New York Times.

Of course there can be too much celebrity gossip coverage, or too much awards-show coverage, or too much of any non-geo-political news. But we need to start thinking more in terms of a healthy balance between what we’ve traditionally thought of as news and stories that are interesting simply for the sake of being interesting.

That Katie has bombed at CBS is a testament, not to the existence of a glass ceiling, but to the fact that real revolutions are so thoroughgoing that they don’t just provide a new answer, they change the very questions being asked. … No woman needs to storm the Bastille of nightly news, because the form has become irrelevant: Oprah has immeasurably more cultural, commercial, and political clout than Charles Gibson and Brian Williams, and no young person is ever going to make appointment TV out of a sober-minded 6:30 wrap-up of stories he or she already read online in the afternoon.

That CBS and Couric didn’t realize this — and that newspapers have wasted so much ink (also see: Dan Rather’s fall from grace, Tom Brokaw’s retirement, etc.) discussing an irrelevant institution that few under age, say 58, care about — is as devastating an indictment of the news media as any stock-price or circulation drop.