This is cool – a diagram

Explainers: a form of news we need now.

Going in to the program, I didn’t understand the mortgage mess one bit: subprime loans were ruining Wall Street firms? And I care because they are old, respected firms?

That’s what I knew.

“What’s basic? If the providers of information aren’t providing the basic explainers that turn people into customers for that information, they don’t deserve those customers and won’t retain them. If explanation is required for information acquisition, then the explainer comes “before” the informer as a pre-requisite. We typically have it the other way around.

So as we think about new models for news we need to think about expanding that little what’s this? feature you sometimes see on effective web sites. That’s not about web design. That’s a whole category in journalism that I fear we do not understand at all.”

Coming out of the program, I understood the complete scam: what happened, why it happened, and why I should care. I had a good sense of the motivations and situations of players all down the line. Civic mastery was mine over a complex story, dense with technical terms, unfolding on many fronts and different levels, with no heroes. And the villains were mostly abstractions! Typical of the program’s virtues is the title. It’s called The Giant Pool of Money because that is where the producers want your understanding to start. They insist.

As long as the news is structured solely around what just happened, journalists are going to be fighting a rough battle. With a latest-news-only approach, we stoke demand for journalism by trying to snag people’s attention with each new development.

There’s another way, one that leads to a more informed and more loyal public, and allows us to do better work. It involves:

* Enlarging the market for journalism by making it easier for more people to understand the longstanding facts behind each story.

* Increasing the appeal of journalism by letting folks in on the details of our quest to uncover the truth.

* Expanding the appetite for journalism by explaining what we don’t know, and what we’re working to find out.

via The 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get at Newsless.org.

via Leap of Faith : CJR.

We are nearing a point—if, indeed, we’re not already there—in which knowledge itself is becoming appropriated by the glibness of subjectivity. The Web’s erosion of the storied “gatekeeper” function of the press, while it deserves celebration in so many senses, also creates a real danger for our democracy: through it, we now have nearly as many versions of truth—textual, historical truth—as we have news stories. Without a shared frame of reference—without the communal authority on which the power of the press has been predicated—we lose our bearings, stuck in the webs of our own comfort zones. While news will, of course, always have a subjective element to it—the very question of “What is news?”, the sociologist Herbert Gans points out, is not merely definitional, but moral and political—we cannot allow news’s humanity to overshadow its authenticity. News is neither sacred nor infallible; that doesn’t mean it’s not true.

They serve as a sieve of sensibility that can help us filter through the split-second news cycle and the journalism it produces—“churnalism,” the British journalist Nick Davies calls it—and counteract the vagaries of information overload. The news-literacy approach, in its simple but rather profound focus on “knowing what to believe,” fights against the choose-your-own-adventure approach to reality: it attempts to make quality journalism a normalizing—which is to say, connective—force in a world that is increasingly fast, furious, and fragmented. The varying news literacy programs and projects out there are contemporary responses to the declaration made by Walter Lippmann in 1920: for communities that lack the information to distinguish between fact and fiction, “there can be no liberty.”

A couple of Twitter feeds have become virtual media offices for the supporters of the leading opposition candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi. One feed, mousavi1388 (1388 is the year in the Persian calendar), is filled with news of protests and exhortations to keep up the fight, in Persian and in English. It has more than 7,000 followers.

via Social Networks Spread Defiance Online – NYTimes.com.

Here’s a review and all the information on J. Hamilton’s “All the News That’s Fit to Sell” book