Newspapers, Don’t be Story-Centric
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...