Why daily AP briefs confuse readers and how to solve the problem

Simon Dumenco at Advertising Age, you took the words right out of my mouth.

Actually, you explained something I struggle to articulate on my own: that sometimes media outlets focus so much on the latest updates and the day’s events that they miss the bigger picture that readers don’t yet grasp.

His post, How the Big Gulp Approach to News Makes Readers Scram, includes this particularly concise, yet powerful paragraph:

The Trib move just underscores what newspaper executives still don’t get: They’re in the business of producing a product that makes millions of consumers feel bad about themselves. The brutal reality here is really about content, not form. As much as newspapers think they’ve evolved over the years — adding colorful infographics and flufftastic lifestyle coverage — the problem is that they still produce information in a way that makes people feel unhappy. I’m not talking about ain’t-the-news-depressing unhappy. I’m talking unhappy as in readers thinking, basically, I just can’t handle that much information; I’m already overwhelmed! I don’t have time for this in my life! I can’t keep up!

He has a point.

For instance, I know plenty of friends who read each day’s updates about Israel’s recent offensive in Gaza, but they still didn’t “get it.” They didn’t understand the players, their history and their motivations.

We can publish all the death tolls we want, but if our readers don’t know why those people are fighting in the first place, we aren’t doing our jobs.

That’s because, in my view, our job isn’t just to publish the news. It’s to make sure our readers understand it.

I think it’s a myth that my generation doesn’t care about what’s going on around the world. I do think, however, that they are tuning out from news sources that emphasize troop movements and casualty counts when they don’t understand the context for those details.

Not that those details aren’t important, ’cause they most certainly are.

But I think that more often, we need to take a step back from grabbing the latest AP story, chopping it off after 10 inches (and thereby lopping off the background information), and thinking that today’s updates are what is most important.

Remember, our generation didn’t live through the history that is so important for understanding many of the world’s conflicts today and our high school (and often college) educations probably didn’t stress those events enough, either.

That’s where good, explanatory journalism needs to step in.

Who’s doing it now?

BBC’s Special Reports, especially their Q&A articles, are one great example. So is NPR’s Giant Poole of Money, which explained the financial crisis better than any other print, audio or video piece I’ve seen yet.

The New York Times has its Times Topics pages, like this one on Gaza, but personally, I don’t find it to be as engaging as the others.

Why?

Well, I think understanding these big, complex stories is intimidating enough. My guess is that readers are turned off when they see paragraph after dense paragraph of dense historical facts, and are more likely to think “I’m never going to be able to understand this.”

I did, however, love seeing that information, complete with photos and links to stories, in the Times’ interactive timeline about the issue.

So what’s my point?

Details and news of the day absolutely are important. We are journalists and it’s our job to document what’s happening around the world.

But … unless our audience understands what those latest updates mean in the grand scheme of things, we’re not doing our jobs.

What do you think?

• What are some other examples you found of pieces that made you finally grasp something that had been in the news for a while but still managed to befuddle you?
• Am I wrong entirely?
• Is there still time to do time-intensive explanatory journalism like the NPR piece with the industry struggling as it is?

[Photo by Álvaro Herraiz]