‘Structured Information Journalism’
Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 7 August 2006 at 16:01
Tags: Journalism
News organisations are too wasteful with the information they collect, a journalist told the recent O’Reilly Open Source Convention, or OSCON, in the United States.
In a presentation entitled “Journalism via Programming” Adrian Holovaty of the Washington Post suggested that news organsiations are make a major mistake in taking information out of the structured — and therefore computer-readable — formats in which it often originates.
In the presentation, reported by The Republic of East Vancouver, Holovaty appears to have repeated of some of the points he made in June during a fascinating interview with the Online Journalism Review.
News organisation dramatically reduce the value of information like crime reports, obituaries and event listings by failing to storing it in structured formats that can be understood by database software, Holovaty told OJR.
Holovaty said: “[T]hey distill it into big blobs of text for publication in their print editions, and then they shovel those big blobs of text onto their websites. At this point, all structure is lost: Crime reports can’t be sorted or searched intelligently, and event listings can’t be viewed in any sort of user-friendly way.”
Instead, he suggested, journalists “should step back and consider more abstract concepts in terms of structured information”. Many common news events can be collected and presented as structured information: crimes, fires, road accidents for example.
Collecting information in a structured database allows news organisations to produce innovative interactive features online that allow readers to drill down to the information most interesting to them. Holovaty’s own work of this sort has included an interactive map of crimes in Chicago and a tool to track the voting records of members of the US Congress.
The Republic suggests a name for this new approach — “structured-information journalism”. Great phrase, but will it catch on in Britain?
Maybe it already has to some extent — it’s just not being done by journalists. When you consider the efforts of organisations like MySociety, perhaps the more likely development here will be that some programmers will become journalists rather then the other way around.
Tags: Journalism
