Each morning around 3:30am, Adeel Hassan and Victoria Shannon start reading and summarizing the day’s top news. By 5am, they have a completed draft of major world events, upcoming NYC happenings, what’s happening with the markets, what’s noteworthy, and a short backstory on an interesting topic (the softer news was planned ahead of time). Shannon edits it, sends it to the copydesk, and by 6am it’s published on the NYT Now app. By 6:30am, it’s in subscriber inboxes as “Your Morning Briefing” by The New York Times.
They’re not the only team working in the wee hours to create a morning news roundup.
The Economist publishes its version at 6am on its Espresso app. And Mic news director Jared Keller wakes up to write and send his site’s morning letter, Mic Check, to subscribers by early morning, as do the folks behind The Skimm, Bit of News, and the Quartz Daily Brief.
“Doing a roundup of links is another way to say, ‘These are the stories we value, and this is what we stand for,’” says Keller. There are also evening news roundups, the likes of Vox Sentences, Vox.com’s 8pm wrap-up, and the Times’ evening briefing. Not to mention countless other daily news round-up services: Circa for bite-sized news, Yahoo’s News Digest app, Dave Pell’s NextDraft newsletter, and Today in Tabs, to name some popular ones.
Each one is slightly different, but part of a growing trend: to tell readers “everything” they need to know, and to do it with bite-sized, voicey analysis.
Because increasingly distracted (or simply busy) readers are being presented with more news briefings to choose from as a way to stay abreast of current events, it’s worth looking at them through a news literacy lens, considering what subscribers need to be aware of to best construct their own news diets.
Implicit in the design of each product are assumptions they are making about readers: who they are, how educated they are, what they want to know, and when and why they want to know it. In addition to being subjective as a result of who it’s targeting, it’s subjective because of who is writing it.
“A lot of the decisions about what to include and exclude are gut, based on decades of news judgment and experience,” says Shannon, news editor of NYT Now. “And that’s not something that can be replicated easily. No matter how many homepages you look at, there has to be some experience to go along with that.”
Dylan Matthews, who writes Vox.com’s evening briefing, Sentences, agrees. “One of the advantages of our staff is that we have people who know what it’s like to be a news consumer,” he says, noting that employees don’t all come from journalism backgrounds. “It’s stressful to follow things thoroughly. I think sometimes we in the news business tend to assume that people are as riveted by as stuff as we are and as on top of it. But it takes a lot of time to read a lot of outlets, or even develop a repertoire of sites to read.”
Learning what goes into a news roundup is reminiscent of a lesson called the Page One Meeting created by the News Literacy Project, where students get a chance to play the role of editor and weigh the decisions that go into selecting which stories go on page one of a print newspaper, or the homepage of a news website. What are the skills necessary to make these decisions? Who should we trust to exercise them? Can we, as news consumers, develop them for ourselves?
“The lesson is really about having students understand the balance, and sometimes tension, between providing a news audience with the information that they want to know, as well as the information that they need to know,” explains Darragh Worland, New York program manager and vice president of digital media at NLP.
Curating a news roundup is a similar process, and as the lesson evolves to keep up with the digital strategies of newsrooms, Worland says that news roundups “are probably something we should start incorporating into the teaching of this lesson because they are becoming the norm.”
And unlike what a reader might find in the paper or on news site, the micro-focus of these roundups means that much is deliberately excluded, something to be aware of when making roundups a main news source.
A teacher would be fired if her lectures were as disorganized as the events that reporters must investigate. Which is why so much of their work is a waste of time. For example, the federal tax code. There have been many news reports on the tax code since the 1986 reforms and everyone knows that the code has been repeatedly corrupted by lobbyists and special interest groups. But the voters have never done anything to stop Congress from enacting at least one new tax deduction for everyone with enough money for many large campaign contributions. So all of the hard work by many reporters was an almost complete waste of time. Their only positive accomplishment was the money they earned for entertaining politicians and voters with gotchas. However, this problem and many others could be overcome if reporters were willing to "curate" an annual one week review of events and conditions like a teacher would for a remedial education class. But no one in the news media industry cares enough about their failures to communicate to ask why one week of the second draft of history could be more effective than fifty two weeks of the first draft of history. ,For another example, all of the pre-recession journalism on the housing bubble and fraudulent subprime mortgages was also ignored by Congress, After twenty plus years of writing to reporters and think tanks, I have come to believe that journalists and their sycophants don't want to communicate like a teacher because it would be too boring. They have an attitude problem similar to the people who don't want to get married because it would change sex into a job instead of an adventure.
#1 Posted by Stanley Krauter, CJR on Mon 15 Dec 2014 at 07:22 AM