adrian monck

Data is dead

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?

Adrian Monck

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5 responses to “Data is dead”

  1. Sorry – off topic – but I notice Marc Wadsworth, the man responsible for the McGrath resignation, is one of your team of lecturers. Do you agree with Wadsworth’s misleading headline policy over at his blog? I hope he isn’t passing his pisspoor jorunalistic standards on to a new generation. Frankly, I’d say having this bloke on the faculty seriously brings your institution into disrepute.

  2. Hey Adrian:

    First thanks for reading my post and chatting about it. I’m glad it got you thinking.

    I would be careful arguing that data is dead because the entire Web — everything — is run by data and databases. Much of it parsed by machines (think Google or Amazon).

    That said, I agree wholeheartedly with your point that people — particularly in journalism — will be the ones creating databases and giving some perspective to them (although that is only part of their job, I think).

    I don’t want to be all “read my bloggy”, but the piece you read is only part of the story. The next thing I wrote was how to write a modern news story.

    So I don’t believe the story is dead — but I do believe the newspaper story as we know it is dead.