Computational Journalism

When you have the daily news meeting in your newsroom, are there programmers or tech people sitting at the table?

Really? Why not?

It's a given that representatives from the photo and graphics department are there, to talk about ways to tell stories visually. And I sure hope your Web producers are regular attendants at news meetings, to talk about how coverage should be coordinated online–and what people are reading on the Web site.

But few if any papers also bring their code-writers in to hear and talk about that day's top stories. And that's too bad, because they could be helping you break ground in storytelling and information presentation.

Look around the Web–not at newspaper sites–and you'll see interesting things being done with maps, data-mining, flash graphics, social media and other Web 2.0 tools. These should be in the regular arsenals for newspapers and their Web sites, but too often they're afterthoughts, or relegated to big projects. Call it "computational journalism"–taking advantage of these technological tools to communicate news and information to readers in new ways.

Just as a good photo or graphics editor can suggest an interesting visual approach, a smart programmer who's facile in these Web 2,0 technologies may be able to come up with a fresh way to plot a story on a Google map, or to whip up a quick flash graphic that can explain what words (or photos or graphics) cannot. Smart programmers think about information in fresh ways that can reinvent the way news and information are presented. Even something as simple as an audio or video link or an online discussion or reader forum can add greatly to a story.

Your online readers expect no less, because they see examples of the technologies underlying computational journalism all around them. They may be clicking from your site to smart new computational journalism sites like Adrian Holovaty's EveryBlock, which is grabbing information from databases, news sources and other places and mashing it up with maps and other tools to provide fascinating new ways to look at city life. Or they may be clicking to Outside.In, which automatically culls local information from blogs and other sources and creates deep wells of local news and information that newspapers can only dream about. Or they may be clicking to Zillow, which combines maps, tax information and a bit of clever programming to track home values throughout the nation. (At least some newspapers are now partnering with Zillow for more advanced home-sale classifieds, but it demonstrates what can be done with computational journalism, as well.) 

And of course your readers are spending time on social sites like Facebook, video sites like YouTube and photo sites like Flickr–all of which do things that most newspaper sites can't begin to match. All of a sudden, the print newspaper and largely static Web site look might old-fashioned–stodgy, even—by comparison.

Readers take these sort of technologies for granted in their daily Web experience, and it's vital that newspaper sites break out of the traditional words/photo/graphics paradigm to start thinking in similar ways and adopting computational journalism. You can do that by making your smart programmers equal partners in thinking about how news should be covered on a daily basis. They're going to have ideas you never even dreamed of. And that's a good thing.

Comments

[Danny Sanchez]

Mark, I agree with the spirit of your post: getting developers to be a regular presence in the newsroom. However, the news meeting is only one place --and by far not the best-- to get ideas from developers. By the time a budget line hits those news meetings, the story has long since been worked on and the editor is trying to "sell" the polished idea for the front page. If anything, techy people should be at the news meeting to understand how editorial decisions are made. I've met some developers who have a great news sense, but I've met others who are rather clueless to current events. I feel the most bang for your buck comes from the techy folks becoming chummy with the rank-and-file reporters so they can jump in at the inception of the project, where it will do the most good.

[Mark Potts]

Thanks, Danny, and you're absolutely right that techies should be brought in at all stages of the story-creation process. I was using the daily news meeting as a symbol of the larger point, but wasn't clear enough. Thank you for making the case for broader techy participation so eloquently.