Don't spike our Kool-Aid

Perhaps in the same train of thought as yesterday's cartoon post: I wonder that in all the portentious talk abounding about "the future of news," Long Tail news isn't more prominent. In a J2.0 world, there are still editing decisions made about stories (more "add this" than "cut that;" perhaps with a dash of "create an abstract leading to the fulltext"). But there are almost no discussions of "does this run?" We're generating and enabling news, not lying prostrate to the limitations of a pile of pulp or a broadcast timeslot.

We've got our heads so far up the new models we're studying/creating that sometimes the old vernacular seems almost comical. Take this excerpt from Ken Auletta's profile of Dan Rather in The New Yorker (not online):

Rather was now pacing the floor like an admiral on the deck. He daid, "I still don't think we've done justice on the air to an Indonesian overview" of how the Muslim government is suspicious of Western aid and yet grateful for it. "Then, there's the corruption business, whether money may be scraped off... I'm not saying we got to get all that today, but I'm looking for a wider shot."

Not get it all today? Why the hell not?

Another example -- I've been having a friendly debate with one of the members of Team Pegasus about whether or not our pay-for-performance ad model compromises our journalistic integrity, or the appearance thereof.

One of his arguments runs like this:

When the opportunity comes to run a story about health-code violations at Restaurant X, who is a big advertiser, are you seriously going to try to say with a straight face that your decision to run or spike the story won't be influenced at all by your existing relationship with Restaurant X? I call bullshit.

Spike a story? In a J2.0 world, that word has no meaning. Reporters will post most stories before they ever cross the screens of an editor. So will trusted readers. And all readers will have the ability to comment and call bullshit on our reportage. We're good and noble not because we're good and noble, but because an open-source system doesn't allow us to be otherwise.

Limited space and/or airtime has always been a great excuse to "spike" a story that's too controversial, too close to home, or broken by a competitor. Space/time is no longer a prime factor in what gets reported. For what a reader with limited time resorces sees, it still is, but "relevance" is now a narrowcasting decision.

On the note of spiking stories, a week after the story broke, the DMN finally reports on the James Fantroy misappropriation scandal -- in the seventeenth graf of the jump of the Metro piece on Al Lipscomb's entry into the Council race. Paul Adrian is not credited.

Of course,  I think the bigger crime was failing to use "I'm going to beat him like an old country mule" as a front page pullquote, if not the hedline.