The Modern Journalist

3 Ways Hard Fun Can Sell Hard News

Hard Fun.

The first time I came across the concept was when I was reading chapter 16 of Nicholas Negroponte’s best-selling book Being Digital back in the late nineties. The idea is simple: kids will learn much more — and much more easily — if you create games and challenges and then allow them to fail, try again and repeat until they’ve successfully navigated the path to completion.

We see this in video games. Kids will continually play a level until the beat the Big Boss. They will, as I say, figure out the code. That concept is why Shigeru Miyamoto — Nintendo’s chief game developer for three decades — is so good.

But it’s not just for kids.

Adults are fascinated by puzzles. Hard puzzles. Puzzles that make us think and stretch our brains. We do crosswords. We do Suduko. We play fantasy sports and run simulations to figure out who has the best trade value. We have stocks. We balance 401Ks and do long-term financial planning.

Our lives are hard fun.

I bring this up because I’ve been reading — and discussing — the future of investigative and hard journalism with some brethren in the industry. The prevailing attitude is that news organizations can’t fund big stories anymore.

Hard news isn’t profitable, I hear. But I don’t believe that. I just think we’re approaching it from the wrong angle.

Puzzles

My friend Chris, who works for Gannett, told me she’d been wondering about creating an Alternate Reality Game based upon an unsolved crime.

Now, I’ve written about the role of ARGs in a modern newspaper and I think it’s worth exploring other Serious Games options at newspapers; still, my initial reaction was one of skepticism. After all, if you’re opening up someone’s life to a game — sending regular people on a scavenger hunt for new clues — you could find yourself in a mess of trouble.

But…

I’ll almost promise you there is a way to work with local law enforcement agencies to create a life-based ARG around those, and do that in a way that doesn’t put citizens in awkward situations. I have no idea what that would look like, but I’d sure get on the phone with Jane McGonigal, the queen of all ARGs, and find out. I’ll bet within an hour she could have several ideas sketched out.

That’s not necessarily investigative journalism, though.

Altogether: Distributed Journalism

If newspapers could get past their desire to “hide” every story they are working on, if they were willing to open up their reporting style, they could begin to engage the public in new ways which would both drive eyeballs to their products — but also create new revenue streams.

For instance:

If we agree that the print and online publication should be different (and not everyone does, but that’s been my contention when I’ve worked at places), then you should engage your readers differently.

Create a space on your site for investigative reports. Each idea comes with tools that allow people to contribute to the reporting — each story has its own space within the investigative site. That could involve a database of information, with reporter filled data — and holes that haven’t been completed yet. Each piece of the puzzle could be assembled by an intrepid citizen who finds that story of interest.

This type of problem solving is how we cracked the human genome. Distributing computing systems such as BOINC — Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing — allow scientists to post research problems, broken down into a series of small problems. People then download a problem and allow their computer to process the answer to that problem. That answer is uploaded back into the database. Slowly, people have helped solve large problems that would take years to do.

There are dozens of examples of this. However, it hasn’t been applied yet to journalism.

But it should be. In that way, you can have — who knows how many — people contributing to a variety of stories, with journalists sitting on top of their information, continuing to create new ideas and to pursue existing ideas.

The goal would be two-fold: create a series of long-form stories specific to the paper (Read This!) developed online and build an online space with all the materials online.

Keeping Score

The odd thing about ARGs and distributed computing: people will begin to keep score against each other, racing to solve more problems than other people.

There’s no earthly reason why most of the time. Scientists give no prizes to the people who do the most problem solving. ARGs are oftentimes promotions for other entertainment (movies, games, ect).

Yet people have this desire to take on hard tasks and outdo other folks. I make no claims to know why. All I know is that people do that. Particularly if there is a good reason behind it. You see it happen all the time.

And with the power of a local paper, these types of hard fun initiatives could easily draw a crowd, unlike BOINC — which is largely relegated to the sphere of science and technology folks.

But it’s not hard to imagine what a smart paper could do with its most loyal participants: invitations to the paper, invitations to public celebrations of the piece or awards ceremonies, special monthly luncheons for the top teams each month.

Anything to let them know that they are valued contributors.

Hard Fun for Hard News

I’m not sure this is the entire answer to selling investigative journalism; however, I could eventually see sections of the news organization spinning off into a non- or non-for-profit segment funded by grants, contributions and other sources that would allow for the development of this type of off- and online hybrid.