Journalists should learn to structure information

Posted by Martin Stabe on 11 September 2006 at 16:45
Tags: Journalism

Responding to the Bivings Report, which recently suggested ten ways newspapers can improve their web sites, WashingtonPost.com journalist Adrian Holovaty has repeated his argument that journalists need to learn to collect “structured information” — which he describes as “the type of information that can be sliced-and-diced, in an automated fashion, by computers”.

Stories need to be stored in away that their fundamental attributes can be retrieved in the future, Holovaty argues. Birth, death, and wedding announcements are all candidates for being collected as a database. But so are politicians’ voting records, lists of Guantanamo Bay prisoners, soldiers killed in Iraq, and many other types of news besides. Adopting this approach, Holovaty argues will allow it to be used in innovative ways in the future.

Holovaty’s own experience shows what can be done: he made his name creating online innovative web sites like ChicagoCrime.org, an online map that plots the location of arrests using Chicago police databases, and has built ambitious interactive features for the Washington Post, including profiles of the victims of the 9/11 attacks and a system to track the voting records of members of Congress. He has been explaining his view about how computer programming can be journalism for several months now.

Tags: Journalism