Computer programming as journalism
Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 18 October 2006 at 16:21
Tags: Journalism, Wired
A key point in Tim O’Reilly’s speech at the recent AOP conference was that the skills needed by journalists and computer programmers are moving together and that it is becoming possible to see computer programming as journalism.
On Monday, Wired News published a great example of how a journalist with programming skills can develop important investigative stories.
Kevin Poulsen wrote a script, consisting of more than 1,000 lines of Perl code, that allowed him to trawl more than 1 million MySpace profiles to compare them to details also occuring on a list of registered sex offenders.
Paulsen’s script confirmed 744 sex offenders with MySpace profiles and led to a police investigation of a man who appeared to be on the prowl for underage boys.
Wired News is now planning to publish the script under an open-source licence so that others can undertake similar projects.
(Hat Tip: Ethan Zuckerman)
Update: In an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review’s blog, CJR Daily, Paulsen said his research had been inspired by a previous Wired story. Freelance Jenn Shreve had found seven sex offenders active on MySpace simply by manually typed random names from California’s sex offender registry into a search engine.
Wired has now published Paulsen’s script.
“We’re releasing it primarily as part of a transparency-in-reporting ethic,” Paulsen told CJR Daily.
But he is concerned about potential abuse of his software by vigilanties: “We’re going to put clear disclaimers in all caps saying first that the code itself won’t give you a list of sex offenders with MySpace profiles. It has a huge false positive rate. Anyone who tries to draw any conclusions just by running the code without doing the footwork is getting bad results. That’s the most important thing.”
Tags: Journalism, Wired
