Data visualization dashboards. Timelines. Maps. Data driven journalism sites. Other data driven stories. Data Sources. Charticles. Newspaper data use manifesto. A blog entry titled 9 Ways for Newspapers to Improve Their Websites has been making the rounds lately. I don’t write about the online news industry on this site as much as I used to, but this article inspired me to collect my current thinking on what newspaper sites need to do. Here, I present my opinion of one fundamental change that needs to happen. For background: I have a journalism degree, for what it’s worth, and I’ve worked for newspaper Web sites since 1998 (including the college paper and internships). The sites: themaneater.com (now a pale shadow of its former self) at the University of Missouri, SuburbanChicagoNews.com, ajc.com in Atlanta, LJWorld.com / Lawrence.com in Lawrence, Kansas, and, for the last year, washingtonpost.com. Most of the points made in the “9 Ways” entry are OK, if a little overly specific (“make your content work on cell phones and PDAs”) and trendy (tagging!).
One of those important shifts is: Newspapers need to stop the story-centric worldview. Journalism -- what is “news” & “reader”? Politifact is an innovative journalism project built by Matt Waite, as a project of the St. Petersburg Times, inspired by Adrian Holovaty’s 2006 manifesto on “database journalism”. Waite and Holovaty both focus on the “shape” of the information presented by database journalism – stories that have a consistent set of data elements that can be gathered, presented, sliced, and re-used. This structure is foreign to traditional journalism which thinks of its form as the story, with title, date, byline, lede, body. The Politifact site started by fact-checking politicians’ statements during the 2008 political campaign. The shape of the data is part of the picture.
What’s new Traditional journalism is based on a “man bites dog” algorithm. The emphasis on concise and dramatic “news” leaves our society vulnerable to “frogboiling”, the urban legend in which the frog in gradually heated water gets accustomed to the change, doesn’t jump out, and boils to death. Deep Throat Meets Data Mining. If you pay passing attention to the media landscape, you know that most mainstream news outlets have had their business models undermined by the digital revolution. As their general-interest monopolies have been pillaged by niche online competitors, traditional news organizations have lost revenue and cachet, laying off journalists in waves that have grown into tsunamis. This process has created dire prospects for the future of investigative reporting, often seen as the most costly of journalistic forms. In the middle of November, Sam Zell, the occasionally foul-mouthed chief executive officer of Tribune Company, concisely summarized a common 21st-century media-titan view of public interest journalism in an interview by Joanne Lipman, editor in chief of Condé Nast‘s business magazine, Portfolio: “I haven’t figured out how to cash in a Pulitzer Prize.” economic climate, the efficiency — of journalists and other citizens who are trying to hold public officials and institutions accountable.