Here's a great interview that ought to show TV people that "tech journalism" does NOT have to be constantly slotted as advertiser-sponsored segments of "Gee isn't this new gadget cool?!"
While I can massage databases fairly decently, I sure wish my dyslexia didn't prevent me from getting the kind of hard code programming chops Adrian Holovaty has.
Still, I do plan to teach myself to mess with some APIs one of these days... That would be a hell of a lot more fun than trying to get C++ into my impenetrable brain.
The bigger gulf here, is the vast cultural divide in newsrooms, with journalists who insist that anything involving technology HAS to be a black box that makes no sense. That's a social thing, technophobia, and has very little to do with the actual technology or processes themselves. I never met so many technophobic people as when I returned to the newsroom after many years away.
The world exploded with technology in the 1990s, and so many newsrooms stayed in a tight little anti-technology cocoon, not even up on the SOCIAL issues being raised in cyberspace, or how interfaces are actively re-shaping people's lives. Noooo, that's a job for that geeky "tech reporter" over in the corner, who goes to the big gee-whiz conventions every year, gets his geeky swag, and does a ton of gee-whiz stories mined straight from the gee-whiz product introduction press releases.
Link: USC Annenberg: Online Journalism Review: The programmer as journalist: a Q&A with Adrian Holovaty.
The programmer as journalist: a Q&A with Adrian Holovaty
Washingtonpost.com's Web tech guru answers questions about programming's role in news reporting and presentation.
Posted: 2006-06-05[The universe of journalists who program is, well, pretty small. Which is why I welcome the chance to talk with Adrian Holovaty, an award-winning journalist/programmer whose work, both for WashingtonPost.com and for his own sites, expands this profession's capabilities. Adrian graciously agreed to answer a few of my questions via e-mail for OJR. -- Robert]
OJR: I think one can safely assume that everyone in the news business understands how one "does journalism" through writing or photography. But how does one "do journalism" through computer programming?
Holovaty: The way I see it, there are three basic tasks that journalists do:
1. Gathering information. This involves talking to sources, examining documents, taking photographs, etc. It's reporting.
2. Distilling information. This involves applying editorial judgment to decide what parts of the gathered information are important and relevant.
3. Presenting information. This involves shaping the distilled information into a format that is accessible to the readership. Some examples: writing style (inverted pyramid, etc.), photo color-correction, newspaper page design.
"Doing journalism through computer programming" is just a different way of accomplishing these goals. Namely, the technique favors automation wherever possible.
For example, it's possible to automate that first step, the gathering of information. That's how my chicagocrime.org site works. Each weekday, my computer program goes to the Chicago Police Department's website and gathers all crimes reported in Chicago. Similarly, the U.S. Congress votes database I helped put together at washingtonpost.com works the same way: Several times a day, an automated program checks several government websites for roll-call votes. If it finds any, it gathers the data and saves it into a database.
The second step, distilling information, can also be automated. Just as an editor can apply editorial judgment to decide which facts in a news story are most important, a programmer-journalist (we really do need a better name than that!) decides which *queries* should be made of data. For instance, on chicagocrime.org I decided it would be useful if site users could browse by crime type, ZIP code and city ward. On the votes database site, we decided it would be useful to browse a list of all the votes that happen late at night and a list of members of Congress who've missed the most votes. Once we made that decision of which information to display, it was just a matter of writing the programming code that automated it.
In the "journalism through computer programming" realm, the third step, presentation, is also automated. This is particularly complex, because in creating websites, it's necessary to account for all possible permutations of data. For example, on chicagocrime.org I had to account for missing data: How should the site display crimes whose data has changed? What should happen in the case where a crime's longitude/latitude coordinates aren't available? What should happen when a crime's time is listed as "Not available"?
Also, I should point out that the two example sites I've given are entirely automated, but often it's not possible to automate an entire project. In most cases, information gathering is done by humans rather than computers, and the computer programming comes into play in automating the distillation and display of the data.
A good example of this is washingtonpost.com's Faces of the Fallen site, which lists all known U.S. service members who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. That information is collected by the Post's fantastic newsroom research team, not by automated scripts.
[...]
OJR: What should journalism schools be doing to prepare future journalists to work in a mash-up publishing universe?
Holovaty: J-schools need to get way more technical. A graduate of a journalism school should be a master of collecting data -- whether the old-fashioned way (by talking to humans) or through automated means.
The closest thing journalism schools currently have (to my knowledge) is computer-assisted reporting classes. Those classes should be required, in my opinion, and even better would be for j-schools to partner with computer-science departments so that journalism students would get some experience coding.
OJR: What types of information are newsrooms collecting right now, but most under-utilizing on their websites?
Holovaty: Much of the information that journalists collect, day to day, is structured. Information such as crime reports, obituaries and event listings always follow a certain pattern, which can be richly exploited by databases.
[...]
The very act of distilling information into a news story -- which is essentially a big blob of text -- removes any sort of structure. Information is exponentially more valuable if it's structured.
So I urge news companies to retain as much structure in their information as possible. These days, it's easier and cheaper than ever to set up a database server. Just do it.
A few specific examples? Any sorts of public records are structured, really. Crime reports are an obvious one. Fire-station reports, local school data, transportation data. There's a ton of this stuff.
[...]
OJR: What ought news organizations do to encourage tech innovation from their staffs?
Holovaty: Hire programmers! It all starts with the people, really. If you want innovation, hire people who are capable of it. Hire people who know what's possible.
And once you hire the programmers, give them an environment in which they can be creative. Treat them as bona fide members of the journalism team -- not as IT robots who just do what you tell them to do.
OJR: Do you think most news managers are afraid of technology? If so, how do tech-savvy journalists overcome that?
Holovaty: I've met both types of managers -- those that are scared and those that aren't. (For the news managers who *are* afraid of technology, you can't blame 'em. It's only natural. Technology is completely changing their industry, whose rules haven't changed drastically in a long time.)
[...]
OJR: Other that the stuff you're working on, what technology you've looked at recently has grabbed your attention?
Holovaty: Generally I get excited by new APIs that various websites are launching. The Flickr APIs are a classic example: They let any programmer query the Flickr photo database via programs.
OJR: Journalism's always been a competitive business. But what technical initiatives should news organizations be cooperating on? What opportunities, if any, are the industry missing when companies don't work together?
Holovaty: I think news organizations should cooperate on removing mandatory Web-site registration walls, which are severely reader-unfriendly. It's embarrassing to be associated with an industry that treats its customers with such disdain.
[HEAR HEAR!!!!!!! But WILL anyone running those obtuse news media content management systems HEAR HEAR?!]
OJR: What online news projects have you seen recently, if any, that you thought were especially well done? (Not counting the Washington Post and other sites you've worked on....)
Holovaty: Off the top of my head --
* Just the other day I saw the great weather/hurricane tracking app at http://www.ibiseye.com.
* I'm consistently impressed by the stuff coming out of mySociety .
* Faneuil Media does some great work.
OJR: What tech sites do you check to keep up with the latest in mash-ups, programming and Web development?
Holovaty: Every day I check delicious popular a couple of times. That's a good indicator of what people are talking about and the new things happening on the Web.
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