The Weekly Sift

Or: Why the Sift’s weekly summary has a new format

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Like the fictionalized and hybridized T-Rex of Jurassic Park, our news media can only see motion. No matter how significant a situation is, it will vanish from our news feeds if it stands still or just moves very slowly.

This may sometimes look like a conspiracy to suppress certain ideas, but it happens for a reason: In our culture, “news” is what has happened since the last time you talked to somebody. So at your high school’s 10-year reunion, “I had a kid two years ago” might be news. But when you and your office mate take your daily coffee break, it isn’t.

Same thing with news organizations. If a publication thinks of itself as a daily, its timescale is a day. “News” is something that is true today, but wasn’t true yesterday. The timescale of a weekly is a week, and so on. Something that doesn’t fit in that timescale just isn’t news, no matter how important it is.

The best example of this is climate change. On most days, probably the most important thing that happens is that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is higher than it was a year ago. But that will never be a headline, because it could be a headline every day. So it’s not news.

Something similar has been happening in American politics. Almost every day, the most significant story, the one that people most need to understand, is Trump’s attempt to transform our democracy into a Putin-style authoritarian government. But again, a story you could write every day is not news, so it will never be covered quite so explicitly.

So how will it affect news coverage?

Dressing it up. Now go back to the example of a daily coffee break. “I had a kid two years ago” isn’t news. But “Bobby had his second birthday Tuesday” is. It’s mostly the same information, but it’s packaged as a more current event.

Journalists do this all the time. They get around the media’s blindness about slow-moving stories by covering related events that change fast enough to be news-visible. So while climate change itself is not news, a storm that rapidly intensifies to a category 5 hurricane (as Erin did on Saturday) is news. And if you cover that story, you can mention climate change as the context of that intensification (though the CNN article I linked to doesn’t). Other news-visible developments that relate to climate change might be when a new report comes out or CO2 measurements pass some round number.

The problem with this trick is that it’s largely up to the reader to connect the dots. The heat waves, the hurricanes, the wildfires — those news events form a picture, but the picture itself is not news. It changes so gradually that daily news reports can’t see it. “Planet Earth is warming” is never breaking news. Climate change is a forest, but journalists can only cover trees.

Ditto for Trump. Individual aspects of his quest for unchecked power move fast enough to create news. This week he took over the DC police department and sent National Guard troops into the capital (ostensibly to fight the “emergency” of violent crime, which hit a 30-year low last year). That’s news. But it’s also part of a larger story that includes executive orders that are based on no constitutional or statutory presidential power, usurping Congress’ power of the purse, defying court orders, encroaching on the sovereignty of states or cities run by Democrats, ignoring the human rights of non-citizens (especially their right to due process), abusing government power to get political or economic concessions out of private institutions like corporations or universities, unleashing the Justice Department and other government agencies on Trump’s personal or political enemies, and much else.

Each of those stories also becomes news from time to time, when some noteworthy development has happened in the last 24 hours. But the larger picture they paint when you consider them together, of a democracy little by little turning into an autocratic state, isn’t news. In the news business, that larger picture is “context” — which means that it’s optional, like the extra credit questions that your term paper might also address. And if the overall slant of a news organization finds that context inconvenient, its readers and viewers will never hear about it. Maybe individuals will put it together for themselves, or maybe they won’t.

In fact, that’s the best way to judge the slant of a news organization: What context do they consider relevant? For example, The Guardian makes a climate-change connection in the final paragraph of its story on Erin this morning, but The Washington Post does not.

Think about how this news-and-context distinction influences a responsible journalist. The larger, longer-term, slower-moving story is what your readers really need to know. But it’s not news, at least not as your organization understands news. The larger story is a forest, but forests aren’t news. Trees are news.

So you find yourself trying to communicate the bigger stories to your readers through the filter that your organization’s definition of news imposes on you. You can only report news-visible stories, but if you do it artfully, you can find traces of the too-large-to-see stories in that visible news.

If you’re not artful enough, though, the readers will see what you’re doing: You’re writing the same story over and over, but dressing it up with different details to make it current. It will seem dishonest, like you’re trying to put something over on them.

What’s this have to do with me? Every week, I try to sift out what happened this week that you really ought to know and understand. A big part of that mission is taking a step back from the minute-to-minute news cycle and filtering out the hype.

In essence, I’m making a virtue out of necessity. Not having the focus and energy of bloggers like Heather Cox Richardson, I can’t put out a high-quality post every day. That forces me to take a week-by-week approach to the news. But for many stories, I believe, that’s a healthier vantage point. Following a news story too closely just gets people over-stimulated, and causes them to think the same shallow thoughts over and over again. And if a story comes and goes before a week is out, probably it wasn’t worth your attention to begin with.

Lately, though, I’ve begun to feel that even a weekly approach puts me on the wrong timescale. I largely cover American politics, and what you need to understand about American politics right now is that single big story: Trump wants to be like his hero, Vladimir Putin. Turning a democracy into a strongman autocracy is a well-known process now. And Trump is trying, day-in day-out, to follow the path that has been worn by Putin in Russia, Orban in Hungary, Erdogan in Turkey, Modi in India, and many others.

So I find myself writing the same story every week, but trying to make it sound fresh by dressing it up in the particular developments of the last seven days. It doesn’t feel right. It feels like I’m trying to fool you, even though I’m convinced most of you see what I’m doing.

At the same time, it also feels like the thing that needs doing: People need to see both the macrocosm and the microcosm, and to understand how they fit together.

So I want to keep doing what I’ve been doing, but express it in a format that is more direct and honest.

The new weekly summaries. This week I’ll be trying out a new format for the weekly summaries. This week’s summary, which should appear maybe around noon EDT, will start with a “Significant Ongoing Stories” section. This is where I name the forests, and explain very briefly which events of the week constitute trees in each forest. When somebody writes a good where-we-stand article on that big topic, I’ll reference it there.

I don’t expect the list of ongoing stories to change much from week to week. To that extent, I will explicitly be writing the same story every week.

Then will come a “This Week’s Developments” section, which is basically the old form of the weekly summary, but without the stretching to bring in “context”.

My hope is that this will be more satisfying for me to write and for you to read. The repetitive stuff will be repeated explicitly, without trying to make it sound fresh. And the new stuff will be covered for itself, and not as a stalking horse for a story too big to be weekly news.

This is all an experiment. Feedback is welcome.