The wave of the future

Our guest for COMM 361 today was Adrian Holovaty, who is the editor of news innovation for washingtonpost.com.

Holovaty discussed how journalism right now is broken. It needs to become "beautiful, clean data that gets written into the blob." It includes the unstructured and structured information. We can use tools like Google, LexisNexis and Excel spreadsheets to break down data. The only problem with structured information, somebody (a human) has to compile it.

The tragedy:

The news organizations have infrastructure to collect info, edit and verify info, get info out to people (printing presses, TVs, etc), reputation for fair and accurate information. He also spoke about the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting as well as chicagocrime.org

• Automated information retrieval
• Does not replace writing, video, photos or storytelling

How is this journalism?

• Gather, distilling, present it
• Call sources, do research; decide what’s worth writing about; write the article
• Write programs to fetch data, decide which queries are worth showing; design the Web site

Anyone that needs more information can contact Adrian Holovaty at Holovaty.com or e-mail him directly at web@holovaty.com. Click on the image below to see another one of Holovaty's projects, Django. He describes it as: "A Python framework that makes building database-backed Web sites fast and easy. I'm lead developer."