Data is a raw material. This insight is a household word, at least since the advertising executive Michael Palmer wrote in 2006: “Data is the new oil.” Palmer postulated in the image of this metaphor that raw data are worthless. Only when they worked would incur from them useful products made from oil like plastic, fertilizer or fuel. Is
Online Texas newspaper Tribune: Many visitors come for the data applications
In the same year wrote the American journalist and programmer Adrian Holovaty a seminal text entitled “A fundamental way newspaper sites need to change” should. He believes that newspapers and other media focus not only on stories. You should consider much more information from the point of how their content is to store them in a structured form, ie in databases. Then, it could Holovaty, from stories in the long term added value be skimmed off. For such structured information can be retrieved with other databases linked and automated. And they in turn can be enriched journalistic offerings – recovered data as a fertilizer of the medial field.
Holovatys proposals are important for three reasons: First, he knows about the technological aspects of decision. The now 30-year-old is one of the programmers of the platform Django -.. A development environment for the popular Python programming language that allows data applications provide a flexible way to quick to Django was developed in the IT department of a newspaper
Second Holovaty has implemented the theory itself and significantly built up the service Every Block. It is broken down the flagship project of so-called hyper-local services, information on the city blocks and individual streets. Much of the information coming from open-data services.
Third was the practice of law as had Holovaty: data-driven journalism or journalism professionals has enjoyed a meteoric rise since 2009. The British daily Guardian started out a Data blog. And was surprised, met with the interest to provide data rates around current events daily. Meanwhile, a separate unit “data” has been established. 2009 was also the year in the U.S., the newly sworn-in President Barack Obama declared his open-government directive. And so was the Open Data Movement enormous momentum that it continues to contribute to the whole world.
the Warlogs from Afghanistan, the Wikileaks, along with some media partners in the summer of last year released, then came the breakthrough data for journalism. As never before, a record was the focus of media interest. And it was made available to readers in the online media in many forms. Beyond text, sound and image data grew so with the journalism a new interactive narrative format.
That could molt this interactive format for unique selling point for online journalism, the example Texas Tribune . The two-year-old foundation-funded journalism project recorded the most visitors, after all, a total of more than 250,000 a month in its data portfolio. There are more than 50 interactive applications that allow access to educational information or give information about the work of politicians. Fed the offers are also mainly from open data.
And not only unique selling point, data could also become a business model for online journalism. The data journalist Nicolas Kayser-Bril, Mirko Lorenz and George McGhee are at least satisfied. They develop in their text “Media companies must become thrusted data hubs” the paradigm of data clusters, which can be online media. With its reputation as an independent rapporteurs could be newspapers and news portals to service providers that provide users with information matching, depending on interest and questions.
Where the development is in fact, is still uncertain. The fact that the pace of digitization and automation, however, change the journalism show, the first experiments with the “robot journalism.” Similarly, it is clear that the data base is growing as more and more governments and administrations are preparing to reveal their knowledge. And because of its underlying concept should not shy away from journalism to deal with this information.
He could advance an idea, from Tim Berners-Lee has long been dreaming. The founder of the World Wide Web for years already formulated his vision of records that may relate to one another – a semantic network. Because this is formed from “linked data”, linked information and will bring a qualitative leap for the information infrastructure of the network, hopes Berners-Lee. For it is clear that records will be the fuel for journalism, and recommends that: “Journalists should be datenaffin.”