I think the depth as well as breadth point is very interesting. I like news too, but it’s often a pretty arbitrary concept. The funny thing about social media is the way that it facilitates users doing that kind of digging around in an issue that only journalists perhaps could do before. And the digging doesn’t necessarily need to be in real-time: if there’s something interesting from a few weeks, months or years ago, that can still be valuable, and so potentially popular.

It’s a bit tedious to relate everything back to government, but I think there’s an opportunity now to showcase some of the backstories, the feature material, the curiosities that inevitably exist in pockets of the big machine, and possibly (ahem) even reach a wider and more open-minded audience than those who follow government news releases.

I was watching the last season of The Wire last night with the commentary turned on (*long* flight + slight obsession with it) and a couple of the writers were saying that they’d had feedback from politicians that their depiction of City Hall politics was dead on.

No one had depicted on TV how decisions are really made, the big decisions that affect communities, policing, education in American cities. They’re made based more on complex deals and myriad interests than party policies. That back needs scratching, that snout itches for that trough. But their impact doesn’t stop with the players at the top. The decisions trickle down right to the street.

What the many eyes (and brains) of the social crowd give us, then, is an opportunity to break out of the black and white narrative and to tell, as you rightly say, the long story. Unpicking the channel restricted story in internet time – internet time not being faster, as we once thought – but wider and deeper too. With more room for meaning.

Maybe it means we get closer to the truth. Maybe it means that more of the back-rooms and corridors of power become public places, and the politicians remember more often that they are accountable to more people than their peers alone.

Maybe. Hope so.

Thanks again – great post. Look forward to hearing more about your sekrit project when you’re able to discuss it.

“What the social stuff is best for is the slower, longer-term story-telling, the relating. The repeated application of this kind of reporting is what really wows people, one-offs are fun, but ultimately unsatisfying, because we don’t, we can’t get under the skin of a story in one morning.”

Chris