Carbon atoms adding up to earth; the end of the (news) article

Jeff Jarvis, a journalism professor, prolific blogger (Buzz Machine) and columnist for the Guardian, has written an article (you'll see the irony) about the death of the article as the building block of journalism, at least when it comes to news. The article has attracted a lot of comment, both in his blog and elsewhere.

Jarvis writes fairly frequently about an important trend: "link journalism". He says the link changes everything. This blog is probably proof of his thesis, which is that there is so much news from so many sources that knowledge is no longer accumulated into one unit -- the story -- but can be corralled by leading us to as much or as little information as we need or want and providing us with links to the original sources.

We have many tools to work with now, first and foremost the link. The link can take us to more or less background, depending on how much each of us needs, and to original source material and to many perspectives.

Jarvis credits Blogger co-creator Meg Hourihan with the notion that the elemental unit of online media (and increasingly people are getting news online) is no longer the publication or section or page or story but the post.

I think that’s right: countless grains of information, thought, or opinion, each with its own permanent link so it can become connected to something larger — carbon atoms adding up to earth.

Jarvis's view is that the new building block of journalism is the topic, by which he doesn't mean just a "topic page" or aggregation of links. Instead it is like being inside a beat reporter's head, he says, where disparate pieces of information are sifted and compared and sorted constantly as new information becomes available and countervailing opinions come forward.

Instead, I want a page, a site, a thing that is created, curated, edited, and discussed. It’s a blog that treats a topic as an ongoing and cumulative process of learning, digging, correcting, asking, answering. It’s also a wiki that keeps a snapshot of the latest knowledge and background. It’s an aggregator that provides annotated links to experts, coverage, opinion, perspective, source material. It’s a discussion that doesn’t just blather but that tries to accomplish something (an extension of an article like this one that asks what options there are to bailout a bailout). It’s collaborative and distributed and open but organized.

It's hard to argue with Jarvis's perspective. I repeat, this relates to news stories (think about every piece of information you've read these past few weeks on Sarah Palin).

This is the reason why newsmagazines have morphed into public affairs sources; it is pointless to try and aggregate the news of the week when people are reading the news of the second. It is also why magazines may be the last home of the article, where people with a surfeit of atomic bits of information come, at last, for perspective and insight. I think this will make the well-crafted feature story and the profile more precious to readers. Or perhaps you think I'm just whistling past the graveyard?