The Modern Journalist

Data, Stories and Technology

I’m oftentimes asked what classes and skills I think a modern journalist should have if they want to stay competitive in the world.

That’s a tricky question. My alma mater, the Graduate School of Journalism at Berkeley, runs the Knight Digital Media Center for mid-career training. While I’ve never attended, I know the quality of people who teach there and I’m sure the education is top notch. I’m sure that you can find scores of these programs around the country.

I’ll never knock education. Nothing bad ever came from learning. But journalists who believe that a few classes here and there puts them on any ground to compete with Google, software application developers and the like are dreaming.

That answer doesn’t usually sit very well. As it shouldn’t. The realization that storytellers are merely a part of data-driven Internet (and not even the first, nor the most important, component at that) is a bitter pill to swallow.

Here’s why:

There are three components of a story: data, which is given context, which becomes information.

If you can buy that as a basic model for storytelling, we’re cooking.

For years, newspapers and magazines delivered news stories to us. Editors and reporters got together, discussed what was interesting to them and the next day, we’re reading about it.

Technology changes that. While I’m vaguely interested in what interests you, I want to create my own stories. I need data now.

Not stories.

I provide my own context and information. That’s what we do every time we Google to find an answer.

But, you ask, how is that a story? How does that provide a service even vaguely similar to a newspaper?

Here’s how: if you’re moving into a neighborhood (particularly if you have kids), you might be interested to find out how many sexual predators live in the area (that’s your context). You can hope the hometown newspaper does a story about this topic on just the day you decide to buy your house…or…

you can go to Map Sex Offenders.

Some ingenious folks took information from the National Sex Offender Registry, used a developer kit (I assume) to run the information through Google Maps…and presto. You have the most comprehensive, user-driven story.

No newspaper can compete with that.

Now, imagine if every government agency, non-profit and whatever other entity you can think of opened up their data in that way.

Think of the areas that would become the domain of the data:

1. Elections
2. The Census
3. The Budget

And that’s just to name a few. Imagine if that information suddenly wasn’t strictly for newspapers. With RSS feeds, Ajax technology, Air and Silverlight…the world of data will suddenly be define in whole new ways.
That’s why you need technologists at the table with journalists. We think in terms of data. We can help you better gather the data that allows users to create their own context and information out of what you collect.

You don’t want to train journalists to think this way because they will never, ever be as steeped in this at the digerati. What you’d want is a bunch of really smart, shrewd journalists who could go find stories that were more than just driven by data. What you are teams of people, pooling their resources and focusing on the skills in which they excel.