Holovaty: ‘Journalism is broken’

Cory Bergman October 7th, 2006

In a well-attended ONA panel on automation this morning, WashingtonPost.com’s Adrian Holovaty, creator of the well-known automated Chicagocrime.org database, asserted “journalism is broken.” No, not the financial scandal, fact-checking, stock price-depreciating kind of broken. “Journalism is broken because we collect so much information and we throw it out every day.” Full report from Dale Steinke in DC follows…

Holovaty, editor of editorial innovation at WashingtonPost.com, used the example of a reporter getting the “who, what, where, when” information about a burglary and turning it into a story, or as Holovaty put it, “clean data compressed into a non-machine-readable blurb.”

Media organizations have a huge infrastructure to collect and verify info, but don’t generally leverage that data, he said. Contrast that to Wikipedia and Craigslist which are great frameworks desperate for data.

Holovaty, equal parts reporter and programmer, urged media organizations to think more about the data we’re collecting and be smarter about using it, getting reporters to enter data into databases, as well as write stories that provide analysis and context.

Holovaty showed off WashingtonPost.com’s “Faces of the Fallen” Iraq casualty database, as well as a U.S. Congress votes database which automatically updates six times per day.

“When someone claims to have voted a certain way, you can fact-check their ass,” he joked.

The data can be sliced and diced in many ways and users can set up RSS feeds to be alerted for when specific lawmakers vote.

He says the automated alerts he gets from that feature have gotten him more interested in Congress and he’s gotten lots of e-mail from other people who say the same.

And to think people fear the distractions of the Internet are making people less interested in government…

Calling all database savvy-programmers - media outlets need you. Reporters? Hone those data-entry skills.

The session also included a cool demonstration from Dragonfire founder Ann Webb, http://www.dfire.org, of flexible Flash templates used to quickly and easily create interactive packages, and Ron Parsons, assistant managing editor at Yahoo! News, who talked about automated news feeds and slide shows as a supplement to editorial decision-making.