On June 5, Online Journalism Review published an interview with Adrian Holovaty, editor of editorial innovations for washingtonpost.com and occasional contributor to this weblog.
See: The programmer as journalist, by Robert Niles.
Here's a particularly intriguing exchange:
"OJR: What types of information are newsrooms collecting right now, but most under-utilizing on their sites?"
"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 majority of newspapers takes the time to collect this information -- which is the hard part -- but they dramatically reduce its value by NOT storing it in structured formats. Instead, they distill it into big blobs of text for publication in their print editions, and then they shovel those big blobs of text onto their sites. At this point, all structure is lost: Crime reports can't be sorted or searched intelligently, and event listings can't be viewed in any sort of user-friendly way."
...It occurs to me, as I read Holovaty's observation, that to many journalists the reverse might seem true. That is, a finished story, while a "blob of text," might appear more coherent (and therefore structured) to someone who has a strong affinity for the narrative flow of storytelling.
That's yet another reason why it's important for geeks and non-geeks to talk more and understand each other better. Rather than talk about "structured" vs. "unstructured," I think it might be helpful if geeks and journalists discussed the value of different ways of viewing structure in data and communication.
There's a certain technical appeal to the idea of, after...
