Going past the news story to structured information

Posted by Daniel Stout on Thu 7 Sep 2006 at 9:32 PM

Adrian Holovaty, of washingtonpost.com, writes about a fundamental way newspaper sites need to change. His main thesis is that newspapers are used to dealing with news in the shape of news stories, but they need to learn new tricks to deal with structured information. Journalists go out and do their reporting and then craft a story around the information of the story. Holovaty thinks that newspapers need to find other ways to use the data that they gather then just putting it into a narrative.

While Holovaty seems to shy away from this term, what we are talking about here are database-driven Web sites. And yes, he’s right, newspapers do need to think about new ways to package information. It may be true that newspapers are moving slowly, but I think they definitely are moving. Some newspaper chains are aware of what needs to happen and already have a plan in place.

I agree with Holovaty, but newspapers have already made the realization he has made. At least in my experience, they have. But whether they have the technical people in place to implement that shift is another matter. And maybe part of the problem are the tools that have been put in place to manage online content. If all you’re doing is dumping stories into your CMS (content management system), it’s only going to churn out news stories. So either it means going outside the CMS to handle the data structuring tasks or possibly it means using a CMS that isn’t focused solely in getting content onto pages in a relatively static way.

It all means that people who can code dynamic database-driven Web sites will be in demand for newspaper sites. But being able to code and knowing something about journalism are two different skill sets. I have those skills, but how many other people do? There used to be J-School classes for CAR (computer-assisted reporting), which is what they used to call it in the ’80s. The question is whether J-Schools are making people competent enough to handle the nuts and bolts of journalism in the Internet age. There are some of us out there who bridge the divide between technology and journalism, but my sense is that there are not enough. [via a.whole]

Tags: adrian holovaty · database-driven · j-school · journalism · new media · newspapers

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