The idea behind Explainthis.org is to create a demand-driven assignment desk for explanatory journalism, says NYU journalism professor and PressThink author Jay Rosen in an e-mail interview with me recently.
I was interested in learning more about the project that is currently in beta mode but that Rosen hopes will soon have journalists working behind the operation to answer questions asked by the public.
Here’s the e-mail exchange:
How is it different from ask, Ask Jeeves, Wikianswers, etc.?
Explainthis.org is trying to surface not just any questions, but a special class: the questions that require the peculiar talents of journalists to answer well. It is not a peer-to-peer site, or an encyclopedia site but as I said earlier a demand-driven, user-powered assignment desk for the art of explanatory journalism.
What do you hope this new project achieves?
Well, it’s supposed to inspire people to try their own versions, or to improve on our design, or simply to steal the idea and do it better. I also hope to figure out how we can surface the sorts of questions journalists should be trying to answer for people, thereby allowing those people to understand the flow of news because they have the necessary background. Serving the updates without the narrative that makes us care about the stream of updates is, in general, bad practice. So I hope explainthis.org points the way to a new practice in this one area of journalism.
Saw that you’re getting a lot of questions, wondered what you thought of them so far and how things are working out with the answers?
We are just in the beta and de-bugging mode for the tool itself, which is one half the idea. The other half is “journalists standing by” to answer the best questions that emerge. So far what I have noticed is that many users think we are asking for questions about the practice of journalism itself, rather than questions about the news, the larger public world, that journalists should be able to answer. We may have to adjust our pitch to make this distinction clearer. Explainthis.org will start coming into its own when we add the “… journalists are standing by” part, and we actually have journalists standing by ready to… explain stuff! We’re working on a few partnerships that will allow us to test that fuller version of the idea now, but we are not quite ready to put them up at the site. We hope to work with Chris Hayes of The Nation on such a test, as I said here.
And we have a bigger deal in the works but I can’t talk about it yet because it is still in motion.
How might this be a game-changer for the future of journalism?
Well, I don’t know that it will be. But I know what my thinking is: journalism needs to become more demand driven and add more value. But in becoming more demand driven it can’t “tip over” and become merely an instrument of click rates and momentary surges of excitement. So how to become more responsive to user demand but remain solidly in the sphere of serious journalism, is, I think a huge and important problem. If we can show there are ways to solve that problem, this could be significant.
Also, the routines of professional journalism have often been better matched to the production demands of the medium or the professional rivalries in journalism than to the needs and interests of users. That has to change. If it does, we have a different ballgame. Explainthis.org can be part of that change. But it’s got a very long way to go, and my hopes for it remain modest. I just think it’s a good idea and worth a try.
Thanks, Jay, for taking the time to answer my questions. Best of luck and we’ll keep watching to see how your project unfolds.