Some in journ­al­ism won­der if the story as an aggreg­ate of verbal fact and reac­tion is los­ing its hold (See Kevin Marsh — The Story Is Dead). Now Brad King has weighed in with an inter­est­ing con­tri­bu­tion — 5 Reas­ons The Story Is Dead.

The whole Web is run with data­bases. The cleaner the data, bet­ter the inform­a­tion. We have become a soci­ety that expects and demands access to raw data — with really good soft­ware tools that let us manip­u­late that data — to give us the answers that we need.

Don’t believe me? Don’t use Google for a week. No Google Maps. No Fan­dango or MovieFone. No Trave­lo­city. No online bank­ing. No Excel or fin­an­cial spreadsheets.

Now try not read­ing a newspaper.

Journ­al­ism never com­peted with these things. It merely traded off the social trans­ac­tion value of people, things, and events in a world of lim­ited choice.

I found out George Carlin had passed away through a Twit­ter post, logged on to MySpace to see what my friends had said and then watched his old routines on You­Tube while I was read­ing Wiki­pe­dia about his life.

I still haven’t vis­ited a news­pa­per site because I have no desire to read some repor­ted story.

Does that mean stor­ies are dead? In fact con­sider the oppos­ite argu­ment. Data is dead. Take a peep at Adrian Holovaty’s EveryB­lock. Every num­ber tells a tale. But it tells it like the flat data it is. It’s dull. I admire it, but what’s the story? I love data­bases and inform­a­tion, and I think it’s import­ant that more be made pub­licly available.

But who speaks for and uncov­ers the data? And what mobil­ises us around facts and their interpretation?