Database journalism orstructured journalism is a principle ininformation management whereby news content is organized around structured pieces ofdata, as opposed to news stories. See alsoData journalism
Communication scholar Wiebke Loosen defines database journalism as "supplyingdatabases with raw material - articles, photos and other content - by using medium-agnosticpublishing systems and then making it available for differentdevices."[1]
Computer programmerAdrian Holovaty wrote what is now considered the manifesto of database journalism in September 2006.[2] In this article, Holovaty explained that most material collected by journalists is "structured information: the type of information that can be sliced-and-diced, in an automated fashion, by computers".[3] For him, a key difference between database journalism and traditional journalism is that the latter producesarticles as the final product while the former produces databases of facts that are continually maintained and improved.
2007 saw a rapid development in database journalism.[4] A December 2007 investigation byThe Washington Post (Fixing DC's schools) aggregated dozens of items about more than 135 schools in a database that distributed content on a map, on individualwebpages or within articles.
The importance of database journalism was highlighted when theKnight Foundation awarded $1,100,000 to Adrian Holovaty'sEveryBlock project,[5] which offers local news at the level ofcity block, drawing from existing data. The Pulitzer prize received by theSt. Petersburg Times' Politifact in April 2009 has been considered aColor of Money moment by Aron Pilhofer,[6] head of theNew York Times technology team. Referring toBill Dedman's Pulitzer Prize-winning articles calledThe Color of Money, Pilhofer suggested that database journalism has been accepted by the trade and will develop, much likeCAR did in the 1980s and 1990s.
Seeing journalistic content as data has pushed several news organizations to releaseAPIs, including theBBC, theGuardian, theNew York Times and the AmericanNational Public Radio.[7] By doing so, they let others aggregate the data they have collected and organized. In other words, they acknowledge that the core of their activity is not story-writing, but data gathering and data distribution.
Beginning with the early years of the 21st century, some researchers expanded the conceptual dimension for databases in journalism, and in digital journalism or cyberjournalism.[8] A conceptual approach begins to consider databases as a specificity of digital journalism, expanding their meaning and identifying them with a specific code, as opposed to the approach which perceived them as sources for the production of journalistic stories, that is, as tools, according to some of the systematized studies in the 90s.
Data-driven journalism is aprocess whereby journalists build stories using numerical data or databases as a primary material. In contrast, database journalism is anorganizational structure for content. It focuses on the constitution and maintenance of thedatabase upon whichweb ormobile applications can be built, and from which journalists can extract data to carry out data-driven stories.
Early projects in this new database journalism weremySociety in the UK, launched in 2004, andAdrian Holovaty's chicagocrime.org, released in 2005.[9]
As of 2011, several databases could be considered journalistic in themselves. They includeEveryBlock,OpenCorporates, andGovtrack.us.
.jpg)
