After the graphic class, my eyes were glazed over with the Adrian Holovalty message we discussed in class about repurposing data.  His crime map was seriously cool, and my thoughts turned to the kind of public records that could be mined and what we could learn from them morphed around and examined from different perspectives.  Just think of all things that officials would like us to continue to miss.  Oh, if we could only computerize I.F. Stone…  tearing those newspaper pages down the center so he could manage the broadsheets more easily sift through the nuggets in all the stories looking for something someone else overlooked.

Looking back though, I’ve got to add that I do have a misgiving about the entry in question about how newspapers need to change.  I’ve got to play the devil’s advocate here when it comes to Holovatly’s critique that about news being too story centric.

“One of those important shifts is: Newspapers need to stop the story-centric worldview.”  – Adrian Holovolty

See, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with information being story centric.  In fact, I think it’s a very good thing.  I do see Holovalty’s larger point that if all the info we are mining gets tossed out there in unsearchable data blobs, we are losing the ability to have our fancy computer gadgets sift through it.  Kinda like the difference between working with a PDF jpeg and a PDF text file.   He makes a good point, a good, STRONG point.

But I have to worry about turning over the keys to the techies.

We’ve talked a lot about the role story plays in any kind of journalism product.  I love to post pure information on my blog, including audio files.  Truth be told, people would rather I write them a story.  (Oh, they like to complain about what I write when I do but that’s another story.  See, story.)  People would rather I package up what happened in the meetings into a story rather than give them useful information blobs.

Holovalty also wrote, “The problem here is that, for many types of news and information, newspaper stories don’t cut it anymore.”

I disagree.  I think there’s got to be a happy medium here between data and story telling.

Repurpose the information in those stories ’til your heart’s content, but let’s just give it all up and be cliche and try not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.