Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Adam Smith once wondered that even though water is far more critical to life than diamonds, it is diamonds that are worth so much more! Jeff Jarvis asks the modern day equivalent of that question: “If information is so much more valuable to society than entertainment, why is it so hard to build a business—namely, journalism—around selling access to information?” In contrast to movies and serials that continue to thrive. His answer is very, well, informative. The key point? “Information itself cannot and must not be owned…That is, you cannot copyright the  fact  that the Higgs boson was discovered at CERN in 2012, you can copyright only your  treatment  of that information: your cogent backgrounder or natty graphic that explains WTF a boson is. ” If you are wondering why society should not allow the information to owned by anyone, here’s why: “Society cannot find itself in a position in which information is property to be owned, for then the authoriti...

Until very recently, several German publishers were at war with Google News. Why? Because they said Google News had become a news hub with links to articles that were created by others who were not getting enough credit (read “money”). Jeff Jarvis was contemptuous about their stance : “(They) stomp their feet like pouty kindergartners missing a turn at kickball, whining “that’s not fair” and yelling that everything wrong on this playground is the fault of another kid, then running to hide behind the skirt of the teacher.” The reality, as per Jarvis, was that they “cannot compete in the marketplace”. In his book, Adapt , Tim Harford talks about the “fitness landscape”: “The fitness landscape is a jumble of cliffs and chasms, plateaus and jagged summits. Valleys represent bad solutions; mountain tops are good.” As if finding/creating peak wasn’t hard enough: “The peaks keep moving - sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly.” And then Harford makes a very interesting observat...

“In God we trust. All others (must) have data.” -           Dr.Bernard Fisher In the Internet Age, it was only a matter of time before someone decided to try data journalism. Data what? Nate Silver, founder of FiveThirtyEight (that's the number of seats in the electoral college of the US; and Silver got all 50 states right during the election, hence the name) explained the concept in his site manifesto : “These include statistical analysis, but also data visualization, computer programming and data-literate reporting. So in addition to written stories, we’ll have interactive graphics and features...We’ll share data and code on Github.” So where would data journalism be different that “traditional” journalism? “While the first two steps of the process (collecting and organizing information in the form of news stories) are thought to fall within the province of “objective” journalism, explanatory journalism is sometimes pl...

Way back in 2006, Adrian Holovaty wrote the following prophetic advice for journalists: “Newspapers need to stop the story-centric worldview.” On the face of it, this sounds nonsensical. Isn’t a journalist’s job to collect information and then write the story? Holovaty explains: “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.” He went on to emphasize that he was not talking about things like making the article suitable for digital formats because that would just be “changing the  format , not the information itself”. Rather, he was advising them to focus on the raw data itself. But the typical journalist reaction to that was: “Displaying raw data does not help people; writing a news article does help people, because it's plain English.” Holovaty was really asking that the story aside , the raw data too should be captured in that new...