Is information enough?
Even if you’re not a journalist, information is readily available from most public agencies. From campaign donations to the full text of a bill going through congress, the words and numbers are there — but they may be difficult to find, let alone understand.
Donica recently passed on an article by Amy Gahran from poynter.org titled “Limited Window of Opportunity for a New News Biz.” In the second part of the article, Gahran writes about how news organizations could partner together and with other information professionals to build “a new type of news where packaged stories are but one resulting product.” Gahran further explains what it would look like:
What if this kind of team built a replicable, open-source, customizable infrastructure that would make it easy for people to track any issue in the state — regardless of the sources of information (such as public utility commissions, local governments, transit organizations, sports leagues, school boards, citizen groups, or even those notoriously tortuous legislative information systems), and regardless of whether their topics of interest would traditionally make it into the paper?
She continues:
What if the core of a news org wasn’t only a staff of trained journalists and editors gathering information primarily to produce packaged stories based on just a small fraction of available info? What if librarians and technologists also were on the job, getting as much info as possible into useful, modular, searchable formats that could be easily searched and mixed according to relevance to particular communities, interest groups, or even individuals?
Donica also pointed out another Web site that takes this idea and puts it into action: http://www.everyblock.com/.
I wonder if database sites are enough. I know from writing stories filled with numbers and dates and names that the excel sheet is the starting point, but I usually need a few interviews before I understand what I’m reading.
I like the idea of giving users the starting point and then letting their feedback and interest lead to future stories. But just putting the information out there, however searchable and accessible it may be, doesn’t give these people one thing they need in the midst of facts and figures — context.
So while the “future of news” will have these tools that allow users to organize information directly from the source, I think they/we need someone to break it down into biteable pieces.