Know Your Journalists : CJR
In 2006 Adrian Holovaty, then a programmer and journalist of some reputation, wrote a blog post entitled, “A fundamental way newspaper sites need to change.” In the five years since he published it, Holovaty went on to win a Knight News Challenge grant, launch EveryBlock, sell it to msnbc.com, and become one of the leading programmer/journalists working today. As the years passed, his post crystallized to become one of the more important, and prophetic, pieces of writing about what we now call data journalism.
Holovaty wrote:
So much of what local journalists collect day-to-day is structured information: the type of information that can be sliced-and-diced, in an automated fashion, by computers. Yet the information gets distilled into a big blob of text — a newspaper story — that has no chance of being repurposed.
… what I mean by structured data: information with attributes that are consistent across a domain. Every fire has those attributes, just as every reported crime has many attributes, just as every college basketball game has many attributes.
This view has come to be accepted and championed by many important people and organizations. There are today many efforts to bring structure to all manner of information, and there’s of course lots of work left to be done. Notably, one slice of data that still lacks structure in the United States relates to journalists themselves.
We each have attributes like a phone number, e-mail address, title, beat, employment history, voting history, education history, Twitter username, published articles and reporting, frequently quoted sources… The list goes on.
These attributes don’t tell the whole story of a journalist, just as a box score doesn’t encapsulate a sports game. But they are material to the whole. And they are, for the most part, unavailable or at the very least disorganized and distr