Article: Data is Shaping the Future of Journalism

A great article came out yesterday written by Alex Howard with O’Reilly Media talking about how data is changing Journalism. Alex writes:

Data journalism and data tools In an age of information abundance, journalists and citizens alike all need better tools, whether we’re curating the samizdat of the 21st century in the Middle East, like Andy Carvin, processing a late night data dump, or looking for the best way to visualize water quality to a nation of consumers. As we grapple with the consumption challenges presented by this deluge of data, new publishing platforms are also empowering us to gather, refine, analyze and share data ourselves, turning it into information.

Alex also got some important and interesting input from Greg Borenstien, Jesse Lichtenstien, Andy Carvin, and Nick Judd:

Bridging the data divide There’s some caution merited here. Big data is not a panacea to all things, in media or otherwise. Greg Borenstein explored some of these issues in his post on big data and cybernetics earlier this month. Short version: humans still matter in building human relationships and making sense of what matters, however good our personalized relevance engines for news become. Proponents of open data have to consider a complementary concern: digital literacy. As Jesse Lichtenstein asserted “open data alone isn’t enough,” following the thread of danah boyd’s “transparency is not enough talk at the 2010 Gov 2.0 Expo. Open data can empower the empowered. To make open government data sing, infomediaries need to have time and resources. If we’re going to hope that citizens will draw their own conclusions from showing public data in real-time, we’ll need to educate them to be able to be critical thinkers. As Andy Carvin tweeted during the MIT Civic Media conference, “you need to be sure those people have high levels of digital literacy and media literacy.” There’s a data divide that has to be considered here, as Nick Clark Judd pointed out over at techPresident.

You can read the entire article here: http://blogs.forbes.com/oreillymedia/2011/07/08/data-is-shaping-the-future-of-journalism/