Matt Thompson Bio
Having graduating from Harvard, Matt Thompson was a Naughton Fellow at the Poynter Institute when he looked into his crystal ball and co-created “EPIC 2014.” This video startled the news industry by presenting an alternative history of the news media set in the future. The original, and its sequel “Epic 2015,” have attracted millions of viewers on the Web and have been cited in media throughout the world. Thompson’s fellowship year at RJI follows an award-winning stint as deputy Web editor for the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
Does Following the News Work?
Jan. 12, 2009
As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been steeped in hundreds of pages of coverage of growth and development in Columbia, MO. The articles I’ve been reading came from the Columbia Missourian and the Columbia Daily Tribune; I read them in chronological order from 2001 to now.
I’m beginning to question an assumption I’ve never really articulated
I’m beginning to question an assumption I’ve never really articulated, but always held. I’ve long assumed that if you followed the news, the stories behind the headlines would become plain. By reading your newspaper over time, you’d develop a high-level understanding of the issues. You’d have an idea of the characters involved, the dilemmas at hand, the consensus facts, etc. You’ll be armed with the information you need to make decisions on how to advance your society.
But as I immerse myself in this coverage, I’m starting to suspect it’s not so. I’m taking the most linear approach possible to following the news: reading years of relevant stories strung end-to-end in order. I should be the Platonic ideal of the well-informed citizen. Yet many vital questions remain unanswered.
I can tell you the names, affiliations and positions of all the key players. I can cite a number of City Council ordinances and infrastructure financing studies. I’ve taken more than 30 pages of notes on my Kindle. But all this knowledge only amounts to an awareness of the events that have transpired in growth and development in Columbia. To feel truly and properly informed, I need to understand what these events mean. But I can’t tell you that at all.
For example, a dispute has long been simmering between developers who say they contribute a fair amount to the funds needed to support infrastructure in Columbia and a group of residents who say the developers aren’t pulling their weight. Developers claim their contributions match those of developers in other similar communities. The residents say the city shoulders an extraordinarily high share of the burden. Each side offers perfectly testable claims. But I have absolutely no idea where the balance of evidence falls.
Devil’s Advocate Matt:
Maybe what you’re talking about is just bad journalism. If the reporters and editors were doing their jobs, you’d feel like a properly-informed citizen after all that reading. But your experience in this instance can’t really be generalized to the industry at large.
The consequences of the events in the headlines seem to go unexamined.
Perhaps, but I have a strong suspicion that the coverage in the Tribune and the Missourian meets all the standards by which we typically evaluate journalism. The individual articles balance the claims of advocates on all sides and bring in independent testimony where appropriate. At an article-by-article level, the papers do a perfectly respectable job of encapsulating the relevant context.
The real questions seep in at a higher level. Fundamental claims, positions and assumptions remain untested, persisting after all the city council ordinances and the bond elections. The consequences of the events in the headlines seem to go unexamined. Developers warn that if voters enact higher fees for development, it will suppress growth and the costs will be passed on to homeowners anyway. Did it happen? Did the warnings come true? I can’t tell you. I have a lingering host of questions like those.
I don’t think the reason the newspapers haven’t answered these questions is because they’re bad journalists. I think it’s chiefly because these questions are obscured by the scale of coverage. If we think of ourselves as covering a bond issue, we’ll focus mostly on how claims and counter-claims relate to that issue. When the voters decide the issue, our work is done. On the other hand, if we think of ourselves as covering how growth is financed, we’ll try to get to the bottom of that question. We just don’t tend to think of ourselves that way.
Devil’s Advocate Matt:
Aren’t you applying greater expectations than journalism can fulfill? After all, sometimes the role of journalism isn’t to provide the answers, but to lay out the questions. At least now you know enough to ask the right questions. Besides, reality is too messy to be digested into info-nuggets. Your frustration just shows that the journalists have done a good job of capturing the knotty nature of the problems at hand.
And these questions aren’t unanswerable philosophical dilemmas
OK, but that’s super-lame. I’m saying I put in all this effort to get more informed, but in the end I actually feel less informed. If that’s the case, why the heck should I follow the news? And how am I supposed to get the answers? Should I keep reading with a dim hope that all this information will spontaneously click together into knowledge? Keep in mind, I just digested eight years of coverage. If the end result is merely a greater understanding that all this stuff is complicated, I’m having trouble finding the value here.
After doing this reading, I am confident of a few things. One is that we are perfectly capable of distilling much of my reading into something more coherent and engaging without discarding too much valuable nuance. Another is that doing so will reveal all sorts of important questions we didn’t answer.
And these questions aren’t unanswerable philosophical dilemmas. They’re relatively straightforward, and they have perfectly concrete answers. It’s just that we haven’t pursued or supplied those answers, because we’ve concentrated our attention on smaller questions.
Devil’s Advocate Matt:
When you throw around phrases such as “high-level understanding” and statements such as “I need to know what these events mean,” don’t you worry that you’re asking reporters to artificially impose a conceptual frame onto a reality that might not merit it? How can you be sure you’re not just forcing events to conform to your agenda, or cherry-picking events that suit the framework you’ve laid out?
I want to make it work better, on a bigger level.
Two points. First, not to rehash the myth of objectivity, but I don’t buy that there isn’t already a conceptual frame at work here. Our mental models determine how stories get covered and how much, who we talk to, what information we include and exclude. There are reasons we think the stuff we select is important. I think we stand to gain a lot by articulating those models explicitly.
Second, it takes a lot of reporting to deliver what I’d call a “high-level understanding” of any issue. I can confidently conclude from my reading that common themes and questions have continued popping up over the past several years in Columbia, and that these themes and questions are important, and that we can weave interesting stories out of them. My talks with editors at the Missourian reinforce these conclusions. I don’t think that distilling the news for an audience that can’t be as engaged as we are diminishes our reporting in any way; in fact, I think it makes our reporting much more valuable.
The question that titles this post is purposely provocative. I can rattle off any number of issues for which I feel my understanding’s been enhanced because I load up the New York Times every day. Yes, on some level, following the news works. I want to make it work better, on a bigger level.