Even though I had followed the latest financial crisis since its inception on every news site of relevance, I had to wait for the Atlantic’s cover story on the topic to understand where Wall Street had gone wrong (at least to the extent that anyone understood it).

While online news as it exists today is great for 24/7 access, real-time updates, increased transparency, and multiperspectival discussions, it still lacks the depth and detail of a feature story in a print magazine.

As a proponent of digital communication, I can appreciate the pervasiveness of news coverage in the online age, but as a student of journalism I often crave the completeness of long-form journalism, which is lacking on the Internet.

In a very enlightening article in the Nieman Reports’ fall edition, Matt Thompson brings up this very point about digital journalism. Thompson writes that while each new day brings with it an array of breaking news stories on various topics, virtually none of them purport to explain the significance, context or relevance of the subject at hand.

This is hard to deny. The home page of almost every popular news site looks like a commercial for news stories other than the one you’re reading: a video clip of the funniest moment on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show from the previous night, the latest gaffe by the dumbest politician, and/or a crude moment of incivility by the celebrity newsmaker of the week.

The fact that these sorts of blurbs beg the reader to go off on various tangents is not the Internet’s greatest fault. The very nature of reading on the Web—short blog updates on the latest event preoccupying the media, hyperlinks that often take one through tangential stories neither directly relevant nor any more detailed—cater to the sense of urgent consumption that occupies Internet users and feeds them with an ever-increasing number of trivial details, while taking them farther and farther away from the big picture.

The Web is certainly not alone in this. Newspapers offer mere snippets of important stories for lack of time and space, and broadcast shows are well known for distilling big issues into high-impact sound bites.

I applaud the fact that the Internet can offer information on obscure topics, and promote the sort of analytical thinking and reasoning that the restricted space of print cannot provide. In fact, comments threads of blogs have some of the most insightful analyses I have ever seen. But this is all the more reason why journalists should be doing more to stimulate this sort of debate and discussion by talking about underlying themes and broader perspectives.

As Thompson points out, lay readers lose interest in complex issues because the absence of context and background often makes it impossible to grasp for anyone that is not an expert in the field.

“I came to think of following the news as requiring a decoder ring, attainable only through years of reading news stories and looking for patterns, accumulating knowledge like so many cereal box tops I could someday cash in for the prize of basic understanding,” he writes of his experiences as a young news consumer before he became a journalism student.

In this environment, it’s often easier to read a story about Britney Spears, which requires no in-depth knowledge of her life, than to assimilate the complications of single-payer health care in America without putting it in context of earlier attempts to do so.

Thompson suggests that bringing a Wikipedia-style format to online newsrooms could prove to be a step in the right direction. He might have something there. Every time I want a quick education on a topic I’m unfamiliar with, I head to Wikipedia. As a responsible journalist, I’ve been taught to double-check all the facts I use from the site with primary sources, but the user-generated encyclopedia provides more context and background to an issue than any news Web site I know. In addition, it boasts of updates in almost real time.

As Thompson writes, there is “something quite remarkable about how stories are structured on the site, how breaking news gets folded into an elegant, cohesive record, enabling site visitors to quickly catch up on a topic without having to sort through a torrent of disparate articles and headlines.”

That this is not merely beneficial to lay consumers of news is evident from the observation that journalists themselves often turn to Wikipedia to find a clear “road map to troves of valuable information,” albeit gingerly.

Again, as journalists, they verify their facts with more authoritative sources that the links below entries amply provide. If news Web sites were to offer the same sort of time line and narrative that Wikipedia does, information consumption could be made that much easier for the casual reader.

It is true that there is only so much reading that can be achieved on a celluloid screen. Much has been written about the various adaptations the brain undergoes in processing information from a light-emitting screen as opposed to static paper, but multimedia has its own advantages to combat such extensive reading.

The New York Times site, for instance, has been using interactive tools to provide more depth to its stories, in topics as wide-ranging as Roger Federer’s footwork on a tennis court to the history of health-care reform in the US. As has CNN with its in-depth specials, such as one exploring Afghan invasion through history and another detailing basic facts about the religion of Islam.

The BBC, arguably an exemplar in multimedia use, has a whole section devoted to historical accounts on various topics of reader interest. The Guardian has a series of interactive time lines on items that span a light-hearted World Cup narrative and the more disconcerting history of unemployment in the UK.

While these are great as standalones, news sites should be doing more to incorporate such features into their daily news stories so that users can make the most of real-time updates.

While the Web has different methods at its disposal to provide long-form journalism (in addition to endless lines of text), it can still do the same thing that a long feature in the Atlantic or a special report in the Economist does. And it can often do it better.

The media has often been guilty of using technology for technology’s sake. In the early nineties, CNN was criticized by media scholars for ushering in the age of “television camera” news, where the 24/7 network offered round-the-clock coverage made possible by satellite-fed communication, but did little else to offer background to its stories. Now, real-time updates, context-lacking blurbs, sound bites and viral videos are being popularized because of Internet technology.

Fortunately for us, that same technology that allows us to transmit snapshots of news in real time also has the potential to provide contextual and in-depth information in exciting and innovative ways. Here’s to hoping news organizations will use it.

The Huffington Post went social yesterday. Well, more social than it already was.

Personalize, personalize, personalize, said the world of Web 2.0 to news organizations, and they did. Last year, the New York Times came up with TimesPeople, so users could recommend their favorite articles to other readers, and post links directly to social networks such as Facebook. The Washington Post launched MyWashingtonPost, which basically functions like a glorified RSS feature. MyTelegraph, perhaps the most impressive customization service from a newspaper, allows people to set up profile pages, form elaborate networks with fellow readers, and even blog on the Telegraph’s site.

Almost ever since Salon started bought the then-groundbreaking “Well” online community in the eighties, new media entities have been about building online communities around their sites. And news organizations realized–albeit slowly–that the best way to build a loyal reader base online was to not only connect to their readers, but also to connect their readers to other readers.

As J.D. Lasica noted way back in 2002, personalization is–and should be–an intrinsic feature of the Internet medium. In a world where every news site is offering almost the same kind of information (with few exceptions) and cutting-edge multimedia technology, what can make one Web site special? The people, and the ability connect with other people.

“By recognizing the importance of serving hundreds of different readerships simultaneously, online publications are moving toward a higher order of individualized news. No longer can they afford to treat readers as undifferentiated, generalized, lumpen masses,” Lasica wrote in a related piece.

TimesPeople and MyTelegrpah, while admirable ideas in their own right (especially for news Web sites that started by looking like near facsimiles of their print versions), however, come with the requirement that people spend plenty of time on the site, picking their favorite stories, sharing their views on those stories, and connecting with people that might like the same stories.

The Huffington Post is taking this one step further by teaming up with Facebook, linking readers to their Facebook friends, and allowing users to publish their Huffpost activities on their Facebook walls. Like all the personality tests they take and crops they plant in Farmville weren’t enough! But there is some advantage to this. It comes close to the concept of integrating online identities and bringing them to one place: the universal sign-in and network portability that many Internet pundits have insisted should be implemented in order to allow cross-interaction among various social media platforms.

Most personalized news features allow readers to search for their Facebook friends or Twitter followers, but they don’t offer a way to actually integrate the two networks.  Consequently, this involves exclusively spending time on the newspaper’s Web site to form a community or interact with fellow users. Now, if you had a choice between spending a few hours on MyWashingtonPost or Facebook, which would you choose? And how many different media sites do you want to sign into at the start of your day? Hell, I’m just glad TweetDeck allows me to keep track of Facebook and Twitter in one place. And the number of new visitors a page would gain from linking to Facebook would probably offset the time spent by a single user on the site itself.

TimesPeople does allow users to sync up to their Facebook profiles, but in keeping with the NYT’s prioritization of “information” over social networking, the site does not allow users to have much more on their profiles than a name and a location.

HuffPost Social news is also quite a leap from news organizations generating noninteractive Facebook pages that merely feed fans with links to their latest stories (the same counterproductive way in which many use Twitter), with readers occasionally discussing stories of interest to them on discussion boards.

Of course, as with anything else, there are two schools of thought about such personalization, customization, individualization of news consumption. Some believe that it might fragment an already fragmented audience in the new media world.

But, if anything, integrating Web site audiences with social networks should help consolidate these virtual and real communities. Chances are, many of your Facebook friends are people you know–and have known—in real life, in contrast to the exclusively online people you interact with on blogs and discussion forums. This is a way to bring those groups together, defragment the so-called “online-offline” divide. Many of the causes I’ve signed up for on Facebook, for instance, are tangible ones, to save the libraries in the city I live in or promote gay rights at a rally: offline events that can make a difference to the community.

Among the many good things about Internet news consumption is the fact that audiences can seek any sort of information to suit their interests and inclinations. No longer stifled by editorial, corporate or advertiser monopoly, readers browse everything from obscure blogs to mainstream news sites to get the information they want.

Ever since Internet media started going mainstream, however, many have raised the question of whether this vast and tolerant space is causing people to replace news that informs and educates with that which merely entertains. One has only to look at the slew of sensational Internet videos that go viral, or the latest online reiteration of Jessica Simpson’s gaffe to accept that this is a legitimate concern. In addition, people have more options than ever before to confine themselves to fragmented communities and echo chambers to get the news they want in lieu of what they need.

As Charlie Beckett points out in Supermedia, while the diversity provided by the Internet with regard to information dissemination is important, it also tends to further the divide between those looking for real, relevant information and those who merely want instant gratification through the latest celebrity gossip.

Of course, blaming new media for its endless possibilities would be sort of like blaming that decadent chocolate cake for existing. Just because it is there, doesn’t mean you need to seek it.

This has been a more major concern with regard to local news. Citizens might tend to focus on the latest iPhone application released by Apple at the expense of important news happening at home – information that would be vital to them as contributors to a democracy.

But while lack of reader interest is a problem, it is often spurred on by scarcity of engaging content from news organizations – if all a local paper can provide is a string of wire service accounts and press releases, how do they expect to keep readers motivated? This was hard enough to accept in an age where the newspaper or the evening news broadcast was the only source of information. It is simply untenable in the Web 2.0 world, where readers can get actual, eyewitness accounts from their Twitter followers and view firsthand pictures through Flickr groups. In other words, in this age of social media and online networks, local journalists seem almost out of touch with the community they live in.

The question then is, can residents of a community do well as their own gatewatchers?

The New York-based site NYC.is, which functions as a “Digg” for the city and its surrounding areas is trying to do just that. “Our goal is to connect bloggers, independent reporters and activists in different parts of the five boroughs, rewarding the best work by sending it traffic and increasing potential for impact,” reads the mission statement.

I got a chance to talk to Susannah Vila, a graduate student at Columbia University, who launched the site. “The inspiration behind the concept is [it provides] ways of democratizing the Web.  This was part of what excited me about making the site,” she says.

Readers themselves direct attention to local news that they deem important, while also channeling traffic to independent bloggers, regional Web sites and mainstream sites. Anything from New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s job approval ratings to rising prices of a pizza slice in Brooklyn can turn up on the front page.  “The point is, it is not just one type of story that gets popular. There is a lot of range,” says Vila. The common thread is relevance to people of the community. In true Digg fashion, the top contributors get a mention on the home page, as do the most popular stories.

Can this go one step further, and actually motivate people to do original reporting or garner data for a new story? “Once I get more of a community on the site with more engaged readers there is definitely a possibility to prompt them to investigate certain things or to [urge them] to go to community board meetings,” Vila says. ““It would also be cool to let people vote on ideas for stories.”

A gatewatching site at a local community level may not be sufficient to provide all the information residents need, but it certainly allows a comprehensive look at what readers are looking for, and what is important to them as residents, and as citizens: it can sometimes be an aspiring young band, or the New York Mets’ dismal season, but more often than not, it is about hard issues, such as the annual decline in household incomes, grassroots candidates for City Council, and governmental oversight of local schools.

I’ve recently been reading ‘Making Online News‘ a book of ethnographic studies of online news production. Tucked towards the back of the book is a chapter called The Routines of Blogging by Wilson Lowrey and John Latta. It is one of the few studies I’ve read to look not at journalists, but at the work practices of bloggers – specifically, political bloggers.

And their findings support what I’ve increasingly suspected: “the more relevant bloggers become in terms of audience and influence, the more their production routines resemble those of professional journalists.”

A few years ago this would have been held up as evidence that bloggers could hold their own with journalists, that ‘blogging can be journalism’.

It’s a sign of how much has changed that, now, it’s actually rather disappointing to read that bloggers aren’t experimenting with exciting new ways of doing things.

The central argument of the chapter is that the pressures of being a popular blogger lead to the same routinisation that affects mainstream journalism, as well as an aspiration towards ‘professional’ ways of doing things:

“More than one blogger said a key turning point in the way they practice blogging was the moment they felt the gaze of the public eye. Realizing that people are paying attention … has led these bloggers to adopt a more careful, dispassionate approach and tone.”

One blogger is quoted as saying this “has led to less opinionating and more reporting and thoughtful analysis:”

“I was more creative when I started, now I’m more deliberate … I started trying to be more professional … Once I got to 100 readers I started to get more organized and started to take more responsibility for what I posted. Then I started to restrict what I put up there … I’ve ducked a couple of issues recently … because I wanted to be better informed. I didn’t want to be wrong … so I just avoided the topic.”

Another says:

“I’ve written about a candidate and said simply that the candidate has been in office too long and should go. I know more, and there are rumours I could check out … but I chose just to say that about being there too long.”

A key line here compares how, just as the restricted space and time of mainstream media shape their output, so does the lack of restrictions shape the output of blogs: “Whereas constraints necessitate routines, so does a lack of limits … bloggers have developed routine practices that narrow down possibilities.”

There is, however, some dubious logic in the chapter. One passage, for example, states that bloggers, “like journalists … do not meet or converse with most of their readers directly.”

Well, yes, not “most”. But I would certainly argue that bloggers converse with more of their readers directly. Significantly more.

From this they suggest bloggers “may” construct audiences to suit production needs rather than vice versa, as journalists do, but provide no support for this (my own research on blogging journalists suggests the opposite is the case).

There’s a rather curious line which manages to compare bloggers linking to their peer group as “not unlike the ‘beat’ routine in journalism, which ensures a steady, predictable stream of stories.” This substantially misunderstands the networked nature of the internet when compared to the physical restrictions of ‘beats’ and stringers.

Then there’s the line that says “Each blog has loyal followers who post comments and send emails, and bloggers tend to write to these individuals, much as journalists write for each other.”

What? How does that comparison work?

These points aside, it’s a fascinating chapter that’s well worth reading. We need more research like this. We also need to understand, however, that focusing on successful bloggers often risks missing the wood for the trees: blogs are different purely because there are lots of unsuccessful ones – something the old media economics never allowed to happen.