The Next Wave of Format

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•Introduction

•The nature of formats

•How new formats come to be

•The state of creative formats on the web today

•The next wave of format

   Formats for coherence

   Formats for diversity

   Formats for navigation

   Formats for flux

   Formats for ubiquity

   Formats for identifying origins

•Conclusion

Formats for diversity: Laying out a variety of perspectives and attitudes

"To my relatives, friends, and colleagues," wrote Ron Albert of the Broward County, Florida Board of Commissioners. "Yesterday, I was a part of history. My wife Annie and I volunteered to take part in the manual recount of the presidential ballots in Broward County, Florida. I know that many of you, especially those of you from other parts of the country, have been given a very jaded picture of this process. I want to share our experience with you and attempt to set the record straight."

Albert's email was one of many passed along over the internet after the American presidential election recount disputes began. Albert wrote about working in a room under intense scrutiny, with Democratic and Republican observers present. "You weren't allowed to have anything on the tables like pens or any sharp object that could possibly be used to punch a hole in the ballot. If you needed to stand up, you had to raise your hand and an election official had to come over to ‘supervise’ that process". He described the pride and patriotism he and his fellow election officials felt at their pivotal role in the election. Then he wrote: "Imagine our anger when we heard on the news that one of the major parties was claiming that the entire manual count was tainted by blatant fraud. In the span of three seconds, they had diminished all that we (and hundreds of others) had done."

This note stood out from all the professional journalism of the election aftermath. It made me want to hear first-hand, from many more players in the drama. What were thye thinking? Why did they make the decisions they made? I wanted to hear, for instance, from the Republican observers in the room with Albert. What did they think of his "pride and patriotism?" I wanted to know, from people on all sides, famous and obscure, the events and life experiences that had led them to this point. And I wanted control over the amount of information available; I wanted to be able to follow a thematic trail as far as it interested me, but zoom back out whenever I wanted, to the "soundbite" level where I would only receive brief summary of events. In short, I wanted to have available, at my fingertips, the news sites of the near future.

Conventional news media do their best to provide some breadth of perspective by quoting multiple sources. But most quotes are drastically abridged, cut apart from the full context of their original statement, and sometimes misunderstood by the reporter or editor. Moreover, in a string of newspaper articles, there is no way to juxtapose Tuesday's quote from an advocate with Friday's quote from their opponent.

I had hoped that some models of future news approaches might emerge from my "Meaning and Media" course and NYU. And in fact, the beginning of one model did emerge, in a class project by Joanne Cuyler and Danielle Nguyen. Cuyler and Nguyen interviewed a scientist at the EPA, who insisted on remaining anonymous, but who provided an in-depth guide to the methods and ramifications of water filtering. They translated all this into a diagram-like voyage through New York's proposed water filtration plant, following the progression of the water as it was cleansed:

"Proposed Water Treatment Plant" by Joelle Cuyler and Danielle Nguyen
(click on image for larger view)

It was a vivid and well executed diagram, but one had to read between the lines to discern the individual scientist's personal perspective. I found myself wanting to add thought balloons or some other format that could express personal opinions from our key informant, and from anyone else who had opinions about the plant. Some of these might be people we had interviewed. Others might be people who saw the diagram on our web site and wrote in with their own perspectives.

"Potential perspectives on the Proposed Water Treatment Plant"
(click on image for larger view)

Recently I learned about a convicted rapist, put in jail on the strength of the victim's eyewitness testimony. Years later, the conviction was called into question. A report on this story could include direct statements by the convicted man, his lawyers and advocates (including an analysis of the failures of his initial defense), the woman who pressed charges, the witnesses on either side, the police and D.A.s who were involves, and some people who can offer broader and deeper perspective. Issues that might seem incidental in a tight news story can have room here to expand into novelistic proportion for those who are interested: the convicted man's experience in jail, the pattern of violent crime in that neighborhood, the public reaction to the case, the evolution of the police and D.A attitudes (in this case, the D.A. had a strong, heartfelt desire not to convict an innocent individual.)

It might seem like such sites would be prohibitively expensive to create. But the raw materials for creating them are readily available. Journalists accumulate far more data — interview transcripts and notes, artifactual documents, and so on — than they can ever put into a single story. Photographs and video accumulate in far more quantity than a mass-market news report can accommodate. And there are always individuals like Ron Albert, eager to tell their version of events. Such a site would eliminate one of the most tedious practices of conventional journalism: The need to include a new version of the background of the story, day after day. In a gradually expanding web-based newsbase, the exposition remains constant as new material is added.

Unlike (for example) the current New York Times and Wall Street Journal websites, these news base formats may hardly resemble newspapers at all. They may feel more like virtual reality environments, in which the reader pushes forward through the email missives, reporters' notes, photographs, sketches of room or building layout, edited interview transcripts, and assorted comments. Reporters creating such sites may become more like ghost-writers, but in the honorable fashion of, say, Studs Terkel — editing the statements of first-hand participants to convey their desired meaning, and checking their words with them before publication. This is not as difficult a task as it might seem, once you learn how to do it. Some journalists see this kind of ghostwriting as manipulation by the source, and thus threatening to a story’s credibility. But in a medium like the Web, this is a far surer path to credibility, because it allows the audience to experience firsthand the cross-currents and cross-references between different peoples' perspectives, ideas, and feelings — including those of the journalists and commentators themselves. To be truly effective, these formats, as part of their grammar, will need cues that indicate opposing views, mitigating factors, differences of perception, and deeper (or shallower) levels of understanding. They will also need to indicate, to some credible extent, why some voices were chosen and others were not. And they will need to find a way to get all of this across without being confusing.

There is admittedly room for skepticism about the amount of material people will read on a computer terminal. In the "meaning and media" class, one of our most startling debates began when some students argued that few people would ever read more than a paragraph or two at once. I asked for a show of hands: How many people read Salon regularly? Mine was the only hand raised. "I don’t have the patience to stare into a screen and read a 2,000-word article in Salon, no matter how well it's written," insisted one student. Outside of class, when I mention this, people react just as fiercely the other way. "I'm sick of hearing that nobody wants to read long passages onscreen," said one individual — who, perhaps, not coincidentally, publishes a lengthy email newsletter.

Of course, people said the same thing about the New Yorker articles during the 1960s. Quality of editing is the crucial factor determining whether length is acceptable. Quality editing, in a multiple-voice news site, depends in turn on formats that allow it to happen cheaply enough. People say that the emerging generation has no attention span, but this is also the generation that has grown up with computer simulations and artificial environments — the kind of games that encourage hours of dreamy exploration. Will they not demand the same in-depth resonance from depictors of reality? Personally, I think the stakes are high. If the mainstream web ultimately becomes limited to short passages — say up to the length of a typical Matt Drudge screed — then it will not have room for the kind of chain of intertwined reason and passion that makes a difference to the development of thinking. If there are no formats to make more complex understanding palatable online, then the prevailing web audience will continue to check out of reality, and gravitate to fictional worlds where they can play together.