The Copenhagen Project

Here is a video from the French blogger Loïc Le Meur. He’s visiting the International Herald Tribune in Paris together with the (now former) journalist Thomas Crampton and executive editor Michael Oreskes (who by the way believes that journalism is the solution to the problems we try to tackle in this project).

The video touch upon a lot of interesting issues, and I was a little surprised to see how random and personal the process of news creation really is - especially in the light of the highly acclaimed goal of objectivity. The video is 35 minutes long and worth watching.

These are the things I found worth noting:

• At 00:45 Michael Oreskes says that journalists and editors has to balance two things: what people 1) needs to know and what people 2) wants to know. Oreskes uses fighting in South Lebanon and a soccer match as an example of these two things. He also says at 1:45 that journalism won’t go away because people care about the world.
• At about 2:20 Anne-Sophie Bloom, who is the layout editor, says that “I’m addicted to our most e-mailed articles (…) but it doesn’t at all reflect what I consider a news judgement (…)” and “(The most emailed articles) are more socially interesting (…) How often do you go to a dinner and have a real in-depth conversation about the next mini-constitution of the EU?”
• At 3:50 Michael Oreskes says that the difference between traditional journalism and crowd powered journalism and editing is that journalism uses “personal judgement”.
• At 10.16 and forward Thomas Crampton explains how the process of prioritization unfolds at the papers news meetings.
• At 11:18 Loïc Le Meur, after having attended this news meeting, asks Michael Oreskes “How do you decide… because you seem to be very like… alone to make the decision“, to which Oreskes reply: “Oh, I don’t really do it alone, I try to listen to what everybody are saying about it, cause it’s really the wisdom of groups, right?”
• At 14:20 Michael Oreskes proudly shows how a soccer match changes the front page of a later edition of may 24th 2007. The story and picture of the first edition seems to be the story about South Lebanon he refers to at 0:45. The story which replaces it in the second edition seems to be the soccer match between AC Milan and Liverpool. I guess we could have some interesting discussion about that editorial judgment. (but I’m not saying that it’s bad. Yet.)
• At 15:00 Thomas Crampton says that editors (among other things) adds context to the stories produced by journalists.
• At 19:40 there’s some talking by Thomas Crampton and Anne-Sophie Bloom about how the articles are placed and prioritized inside the newspaper itself.
• At 21:05 and forward Loïc Le Meur talks to the web-coordinator ‘Jim’ about how iht.com is coordinated with the print edition. At 23:40 he says that all user comments are moderated.
• At 27:30 and forward Loïc Le Meur talks to Doreen Carvajal, who is media reporter, about how journalists decides what is important to write about. She says that it’s decided by what the journalist finds interesting, that she consult with other journalists and their editors, that the inspiration comes from reading a lot of newspapers, websites, blogs and that she tries to look for trends.
• At 30:55 Thomas Crampton tells what he thinks constitutes a good story: 1) It grabs people, 2) It’s very human, 3) It’s something the reader can relate to, 4) a story that present an otherwise boring subject from a new and interesting angle.
• At 32:00 Thomas Crampton talks about working under a deadline.

The Copenhagen Project is not about newspapers per se, but each of these points provides interesting perspectives on all of the things we want to investigate and discuss during this project.

Staying up to date with what’s happening in the world, the events that has impact on your world is personal commitment. In the physical world we did it through symbolic commitments to a daily newspaper, a weekly news magazine and monthly magazines. We made the commitment and the commitments objects arrived on our doorsteps.

It was a commitment, not a choice to read specific stories, it was a format that encouraged peripheral vision on subjects we wouldn’t necessarily read, a commitment to being a human being that took responsibility to know the world around hum/her.

In the new context a lot of this has been replaced by on-demand browsing, with perhaps rss subscriptions and email newsletters as one of the few areas that resembles commitments.

What are the new iconic commitments?

The World Wide Web is basically made out of pieces of digital information and links. When it arrived, we tried to explain what was going on here with metaphors. Thus terms as ‘page’, ‘article’, ‘newspaper’ etc. became common words in context of the web, even though they originally had a meaning connected to the physical world.

It seems to me that we should try to get rid of these words and invent completely new ones in order to not limit our brains and thereby innovation. Even though “everybody knows what we mean when we’re talking”, words still have the tendency to connect to old and unwanted connotations that limit our creativity.

We operate with the concept of an article because of the limited physical space in traditional paper medias. An article can only include a certain number of abstractions and thoughts that gets connected in the text, described with words. On the web there’s no limit to how much information we can connect and discuss without actually including the information in a given artifact.

The big questions therefore are: How would we structure information, if we didn’t use concepts from the physical world to come up with ideas? And what is the best way to present information when we use the advantages of the web?