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.

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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.