Most of the discussion of journalism’s future takes place around technology. There’s very little reappraisal of how we act to present stories and information. It struck me again reading Edward Tufte‘s Envisioning Information. Tufte presents a piece by David Hellerstein from Harper’s in 1984, called “The Slow, Costly Death of Mrs K–.”

Hellerstein analyses and comments on the medical bill of a dying woman, as she spends her last 26 days on an intensive care unit. Tufte represents the piece graphically as the actual bill with annotations. It’s an extremely effective portrayal.

Tufte’s latest book – Beautiful Evidence – outlines some of his thoughts on journalism as a secondary market not in information, but in presentation:

Evidence-based reports are repackaged and marketed by bureaucracies of secondary presentations: public relations, advertising, programs for public outreach, schoolbook publishing, journalism, and the vast government Ministries of Propaganda…

In the sausage-making, chop-shop production of many secondary and tertiary presentations, absent are methods that routinely help enforce the intellectual quality and integrity in primary work: external review and final approval by content experts, professional standards of evidence, skeptical intelligence.

Tufte suggests dumping the intermediaries by having primary presenters produce secondary presentations of their work.

Redefining part of journalism as a facilitation process in secondary communication presentation sounds ugly, but it just might be promising. We’ll start by rewriting that line.