WHAT'S BAD FOR ME IS GOOD FOR YOU.

Mike Scherer's musings on how the Politico is transforming Time's approach to news actually confused me a bit. It's not that his post isn't good, as it is. But Mike laments the death of the absolute worst convention in journalism: The 1,000 word wrap-up article.The subject here is Cheney's Sunday interview. Mike was readying to write a long post on the ex-veep's self justifying grumblings, but then he noticed that Politico had already written on the event. Nine times. They had one squib on Cheney's comments on Iraq and another detailing his defense of Scooter Libby and another on his warnings about terrorism and six more on different aspects of the interview. Mike gets the appeal of this, but also thinks something is lost.

Once upon a time, the incentive of a print reporter at a major news organization was to create a comprehensive, incisive account of an event like Cheney's provocative interview on CNN. (Open the New York Times or the Washington Post tomorrow, and you will still be able to read versions of this story.) That account would then be packaged into a container (a newspaper, a magazine, a 30-minute network news broadcast) and sold to the consumer. In the Internet-age, by contrast, what matters is not the container, but the news nugget, the blurb, the linkable atom of information.

I think the word "incentive" is doing a lot of lifting here. A better term would be "problem." The print reporter at a major news organization had very little space. Cheney spoke for an hour. That's thousands of words. But if you have to report the news of the whole world in a couple dozen pages of newsprint, you have to make choices. Hard ones. You certainly couldn't report all that Cheney said. So you didn't. The reporter decided which comments were important and wove them into a story. It was not a "comprehensive, incisive" account so much as a coherent one. Sometimes that account got the important part and sometimes it only got the controversial part. Either way, it confined Cheney's interview to a clean narrative that came in under 1,000 words, and it was all the reader had. You can see the results at the New York Times today. The headline is "Cheney Says Obama Has Increased Risks." Hopefully, that's what the reader wanted. But Cheney also commented on the banks and health reform and congressional opposition and much else. It's not the reporters fault that that couldn't be squeezed into the print edition of the newspaper. Publishing the full transcript would have forced out 10 other articles. The print reporter of Scherer's memory was an answer to the scarcity of information and a scarcity of space for that information. He tried to solve it by predicting what the reader would want most and writing only that piece of it. In theory, he brought you as much information was possible in as little space as possible. He chose and condensed.By contrast, the Politico (and all of us) are dealing with the opposite problem: An abundance of information and an abundance of space. The whole transcript of Cheney's interview with King is available online -- as are hundreds of blog posts commenting on it and dozens of articles running through it. The problem now is not too little information but too much: Finding and sorting it all is near impossible. But it's increasingly what journalists are asked to do. And various outlets and jorunalists have emerged with different strategies. The Politico pulls nine stories from the transcript in order to satisfy nine (or more!) different types of readers who all have their unique set of interests. Whenever possible, I append the primary source of every document to my write-up of the event or policy or speech. It's a stranger role, and certainly a less powerful one. Before, only we had access to these transcripts and documents. Now everyone does. As our monopoly on information has lessened, so too has our value, and certainty in our role. But our readers are more informed. It's an odd space: Reporters have become much less important but also much more effective. We have less control over data but can offer more of it. At the end of the day, that's a good thing. But maybe not for us.