A week ago Josh Korr wrote a great post at Publish 2 vilifying the media for their tendency to make a story out of literally everything. All of us junkies who followed the election can attest to this habit’s existence.
On the one hand, he makes a great point—there are a lot of stories that end up being “filler.” They won’t attract many links (if any), and they don’t shed any particularly brilliant light on new or important issues. The example he gives is excellent: a reporter refused to write up a McCain stunt that was just that, a stunt.
On the other hand, you find people like Tracy Record who are building an impressive and profitable audience by reporting absolutely everything they possibly can.
It seems clear to me that even if reading all that news isn’t your particular idea of fun times, someone is going to come along and find out it floats their boat just fine. And the beauty of the internet is that once its up there, it costs nothing to maintain.
In a nutshell, I think the “filter then publish” model is dead. Now it’s “publish then filter.” A profitable news company has to let the audience decide what’s worth producing.
Scary, right?
Eat Sleep Publish is a Seattle-based blog that explores the difficulties and opportunities currently facing the publishing industry. 
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Hey Jason,
Thanks for the thoughtful response to my post. I think the big question is not “What news should news organizations publish or not publish?” — it’s “What kinds of news can news orgs hand off to people who don’t work there?” (My subsequent post gets into this more.)
There are a few things that I think aren’t worth writing at all, by anyone — stories on dubious studies, stories on certain political stunts, bogus trend pieces. For the most part, though, you’re right that most information or news will eventually be of interest to somebody, so why not put it out there.
But while it’s true that “once its up there, it costs nothing to maintain,” it costs news orgs a lot of money to produce that stuff in the first place. And those companies can’t be profitable if they primarily produce material that becomes part of the long tail of news and may be read by only a couple people a month. News organizations simply have to continue to filter before they publish.
But what they should start doing as part of the filtering process is a) change their filter to focus on readers, not on outdated news-selection traditions and habits; and b) figure out how to offer some of the filler/long-tail news without having to spend significant resources of their own.
If citizen journalists, local bloggers (via links), automated databases, etc. can provide some of this coverage, then news orgs can offer big investigative stuff, thorough beat reporting, and the less flashy coverage that interests some readers some of the time but may not be worth it for news orgs to do themselves.
Also, I’d bet that local blogs like Tracy Record’s aren’t successful because they report “absolutely everything they possibly can” (which is much different from “absolutely everything, period”) — but because they report news that’s extremely relevant to their readers, and do so in an engaging way. They filter before they publish as much as any traditional news org does. It’s just a different, arguably smarter, filter.
Josh – you’re welcome.
I don’t think I’m suggesting that a news organization be “dumb” in terms of its news production – there are very real resource restraints that news organization face every day. What I am trying to suggest is that a smart newspaper will do whatever it can to build a long-tail umbrella for little or no cost.
I’m totally with you on outsourcing as much production as possible. I’m a big proponent of small economic benefits as a tool to fill in a new organization’s long-tail content.
I’ll have to go read your subsequent posts. And for what it’s worth, Publishing 2.o was (before you got there, I think) and (now that you’re there) continues to be an inspiration to me for this blog.