Rebecca's Delaney's Blog, week of 2/1

From as far back as freshman year of high school, teachers have warned my classes not to trust Wikipedia. The way they talked about the site made it sound like it’s actually run by a Satanic conspiracy group, but I’m still glad the message set in. Wikipedia is a useful tool for rapidly gathering background information and building a frame of reference when I’m clueless about a topic, but now that I’m writing real news stories, getting factual information from a site anyone can edit is basically like playing journalistic Russian Roulette. Sure…most of the time, Wikipedia’s accurate. You could pull facts from it and seldom make an error. But once in a while, you’re bound to get blasted with a glaring mistake (or several). It’s not smart to gamble when it comes to accuracy.

Readers shouldn’t have to gamble with accuracy either. But I think they should still have the luxury of convenience when it comes to being informed, and that’s why I’m so fascinated by the idea of modifying news web outlets to mimic a wiki model. Wikipedia is popular because it’s so incredibly easy to use. Wikipedia wrote the book on context — each page branches out in countless links offering background and tangents to explore. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if a news outlet like the Columbia Missourian could offer coverage with the same contextual strength?

Blog sites already use the kind of technology the Missourian could adopt to become a little more “wikiish.” The tags bloggers attach to their posts could be modified to suit the needs of a newspaper’s web site. If we indexed all of our stories under certain categories and could hotlink a series of older articles offering readers context when they check out a new topic, we’d be doing them a huge service. I’m envisioning a turbocharged version of the “more story” thing we do now. I don’t just want “more story.” I want a Columbia dictionary, defining every single key term we can think of so that we can link those terms to their definitions when they appear in stories. Instead of a few more articles linked to new stories, I want readers to be able to click a link where they can see a visually appealing, chronological presentation of relevant coverage.

Let’s say we run a story about City Council elections for the First Ward. To me, an ideal news site would link to condensed bios the first time a candidate is mentioned in every story. If an important issue is being discussed in the story, I want a link to a short summary of what that issue entails. And if readers want even more background, they could click a link to access stories from the past several months about the First Ward, City Council elections, etc.

I know this whole concept is incredibly idealistic; implementation would be a logistical nightmare. But if we can’t get the ball rolling to explore how to better inform readers, then what’s the point of being a journalist at all?

Progress report:
The first story was the big obstacle for me. Now that it’s out of the way, I’m feeling infinitely better about my newsroom performance. I think my story on the Ragtag was a really solid bit of coverage. We broke the news that True/False will intentionally be slowing its growth to avoid becoming something of a Midwestern Sundance, and I think that’s a great start to my semester. Also, the story idea I pitched last week for a future Saturday cover looks like it will pan out beautifully. I want to cover a new exhibit at MU’s Art & Archaeology museum featuring pre-Columbian (Christopher, that is) artwork of the Americas. But instead of doing the generic preview story, I want to cover the heck out of this exhibit, linking it to Columbia, Missouri and Midwest pre-Columbian history and artwork. Hopefully, this story will appeal to a wider demographic than strictly those who would be interested in a new art exhibit.