serial consign

Over the last 18 months there has been no shortage of discussion on the death of the newspaper industry. This continually revised obituary now undermines not just the business model behind print journalism, but the methodology of news collection and reporting. As Craigslist killed the classified ad, Jay Rosen's Huffington Post experiment Off the Bus is redefining coverage of the campaign trail.

It has now been about three months since I finished Movable Parts, an architectural response to the problems facing the contemporary editorial space. The project focused on the particularly dire situation of the floundering Los Angeles Times. I'm excited to come back to the topic after stepping back for a few months, and I will begin republishing commentary and interviews here in the near future.

The new Renzo Piano-designed New York Times headquarters has provoked intelligent discussion about the intersection of media and architecture. The Times' presence in the skyline of New York, as well as its delivery of a (supposed) idealized workspace for the information economy, are both useful starting points in evaluating the project. However, the newspaper's ability to address the flow of information, combined with its acceptance of reader participation, will determine its future success as a viable means of branding a flow of information.

[image: new york times headquarters july/07 - courtesy of lasadh]

The above image tracks the front page of latimes.com from 2002 through 2006, illustrating how quickly online presence can evolve. Note how the page structure and hierarchy have changed as images (yellow) and advertising (orange) have gradually become integrated with editorial content (blue). However, the manner in which information and links are collaged across a page (or interconnected through a database) is emblematic of a deeper organizational problem with the way that newspapers have dealt with digital content. These problems were highlighted by internet developer Adrian Holovaty in a fall 2006 post to his blog:

Say a newspaper has written a story about a local fire. Being able to read that story on a cell phone is fine and dandy. Hooray, technology! But what I really want to be able to do is explore the raw facts of that story, one by one, with layers of attribution, and an infrastructure for comparing the details of the fire - date, time, place, victims, fire station number, distance from fire department, names and years experience of firemen on the scene, time it took for firemen to arrive - with the details of previous fires. And subsequent fires, whenever they happen.

Holovaty's gripe with digital news is the manner in which it clusters "stories" as nodes rather than concurrent fragments of information. He points to the need for "database journalism" and has been exploring this possibility through the highly publicized chicagocrime.org mashup and his recently launched Ellington content management system, which is designed specifically for contemporary journalism. In a 2006 interview entitled The Programmer as Journalist, Holovaty points out the types of issues the media needs to think about in presenting information online:

...in creating websites, it's necessary to account for all possible permutations of data. For example, on chicagocrime.org I had to account for missing data: How should the site display crimes whose data has changed? What should happen in the case where a crime's longitude/latitude coordinates aren't available? What should happen when a crime's time is listed as "not available"?

Cast in this light, journalism starts to sound as if it is about populating arrays of data, in addition to creating narratives and providing context.

I find this topic fascinating and I think the print media identity crisis is symbolic of much larger societal and technological shifts. Do we monetize the flow of information – if so, how? How will crowdsourcing change and supplement traditional journalism? Does the press need a headquarters, an icon in the city from which to interface with the civic realm? There are all questions that will be explored in the coming months with this series of posts entitled Paper Space.

Some recent news about news: