Who’s your Adrian Holovaty?
Liz Foreman March 3rd, 2007
Back when most people thought text, video, a message board, photo gallery, related links and a poll comprised a darn good web news story, Adrian went way beyond, showing us how to make massive amounts of data interactive. Now, it looks like more companies are on board, hiring their own versions of Adrian.
Cory adds: “The problem, quite frankly, is that many media companies have their own version of Adrian, but they’re not empowered or even allowed to pursue bold new ideas.”
6 Comments Add your own
1. Patrick B | March 4th, 2007 at 8:52 am
I applaud any newspaper that’s hiring folks with database skills. But I don’t understand why they’re asking for these candidates to have journalism degrees.
That’s really going to limit the field. Or maybe it will boost what these candidates are going to ask for a paycheck.
2. gralnick | March 4th, 2007 at 9:20 am
And people ARE listening…see below from Columbia School of J.
_______________________________________
___________________________________
This year’s installment of our popular annual new media lecture series.
Nicholas Lemann, Dean of Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism cordially invites you
to the annual Hearst Foundation New Media Lecture by ADRIAN HOLOVATY Thursday, April 19, 2007
Join us to hear Adrian Holovaty, editor of editorial innovations at washingtonpost.com, 2007 Hearst New Media Lecturer at Columbia and one of the most exciting and influential young minds in journalism (bio below).
6:30-7:00 pm - reception - drinks and light food
7-9 pm - lecture + Q&A
No charge; no RSVP required; all are welcome.
3. Cory | March 4th, 2007 at 2:23 pm
The problem, quite frankly, is that many media companies have their own version of Adrian, but they’re not empowered or even allowed to innovate bold new ideas.
4. invitedmedia | March 4th, 2007 at 2:54 pm
how true.
5. tim | March 4th, 2007 at 7:05 pm
Having interned at a newspaper in a midrange midwestern town for two summers during my computer science studies in college, I feel that newspaper companies do not grasp the potential that the Internet can provide to midrange newspaper outlets.
Fortunately, I decided not to pursue an opportunity to begin my career in the newspaper industry. I got frustrated with the difficulty the newspaper companies are in at this point in time - with so much potential at hand, and not willing to budge an inch thinking the typewriter is going to make a comeback sometime soon.
Those companies that don’t have their own version of Adrian by now, will not last much longer. These newspapers are being swallowed up by competing newspapers who have ‘Adrian’, one by one.
In my experience if a newspaper company doesn’t get or have an ‘Adrian’ they will find it harder and harder to exist as a mainline newspaper and are probably already starting to see the consequences of such.
Anybody can have a website, but just because you have a ‘website’ doesn’t mean people are looking - it’s all about content and interactivity.
6. David Johnson | March 5th, 2007 at 11:55 am
I tell my multimedia journalism students, and anyone else who will listen for that matter, that we’re really just in the infancy of figuring out what we’re doing online.
no better evidence of this is chicagocrime, which takes a piece of typically clerk-generated newspaper furniture, the police blotter, and unlists it into an easier-to-use lite GIS. but there have been earlier examples of this on even grander scope that may be harder to fit into context. look at marketwatch, which completely unhinged entire sections of financial agate and rendered them obsolete, or, simiarly, the countless sports statistics sites that have emerged.
coming up with better presentation logic for databases of information where users can selectively query the data is certainly one basic level of interactivity that seems difficult to realize but it essentially trumps the printed newspaper’s role in providing fact-based information. Herein lies the death of newspaper classifieds. The content types are essentially variants on the same theme.
higher-level journalism is built around this primordial platform of factual, lightly-filtered lists. deadline reporting, story-telling, investigative, enterprise… all of it is framed by basic lists of categorized information: stock prices; stats, standings and scores; crimes; home sale prices; community calendars; classified liners…. you name it… these are the bread and butter of publishing and serving a community. you can mash them all up and go GIS crazy or provide forms so people can query and report the data any way they want and pat yourself on the back for being interactive. We have been able to do this one way or another for a long time.
But, once the data is displayed, where do you apply your higher-level journalism? How do you tell the story (or stories) of the data? How do you embrace real interactivity, where people actually interact with people and don’t just use selective qualifiers to follow a logic tree or pre-ordained process flow chart?
Once we’ve ‘adrianized’ all the agate and lists (and built google earth the biggest, baddest GIS in the process), what happens next? Holovaty himself has already started thinking about unhinging narrative storytelling into XML elements (check xml.com for the article). That is where we should be thinking too so we can remember that you can do more with flash and actionscript than just use it as a video player.
These are still the salad days, and we’re still all looking at the tables next to us and saying, “i’ll have what they’re having.” Meanwhile, the homecooking smells better and more innovative everyday. I hope more experimentation is coming. We’re due.
Leave a Comment
(Please keep URLs out of the comment body or the spam filter will block you.)Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed