{"id":459,"date":"2007-06-05T06:03:00","date_gmt":"2007-06-05T12:03:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/?p=459"},"modified":"2007-06-05T06:03:00","modified_gmt":"2007-06-05T12:03:00","slug":"from-journalism-to-public-information","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/2007\/06\/from-journalism-to-public-information\/","title":{"rendered":"From journalism to public information"},"content":{"rendered":"

J<\/span>ournalism has many bastard children: PR, marcomms, opinion polling. It\u2019s not proud of them, and they return the favour. So how about a chip off the old block that journalism could be proud of? A new discipline that journalism could pat kindly on the head.<\/p>\n

I’m talking about something deeply unsexy – public information. Now journalism has always been a bit half-hearted about its responsibilities when it comes to informing the public.<\/p>\n

In the 1930s Time<\/span>-founder Henry Luce<\/span><\/a> warned with characteristic overstatement \u201cnever in the long history of Western civilization was the purely informative function of journalism more important than it is today.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the same time journalists on the Washington Times<\/span><\/span> were being told that the average reader: <\/p>\n

does not care a hang about tax-rates, budgets, insurance, disarmament, naval appropriations, public utility policies, municipal improvements, or scores of other subjects which may appear to be important … Let us disregard, or cover perfunctorily, subjects which are merely important, but not interesting.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

William Randolph Hearst<\/span><\/a>, who owned the Times<\/span><\/span>, noted that a good editor \u201cwould prefer a novelty that is not a fact to a fact that is not a novelty.\u201d<\/p>\n

Informing the public is an incidental, occasionally accidental function of journalism, what economists might call a positive externality. Journalism has been a rather inefficient means of delivering enlightenment to the public.<\/p>\n

But new means of aggregating and distributing information are radically changing the way we keep track of politicians, for example. In the UK, a not-for-profit like theyworkforyou.com<\/span><\/a> provides information at a depth and with a convenience that far outstrips what old-style political reporting could deliver.<\/p>\n

So what would the birth of a new discipline of public information mean?<\/p>\n

It could mean measuring the gaps between officially mandated levels of information provision and actual delivery.<\/p>\n

It could mean mash-ups and scrapers, re-purposing information and making it publicly available.<\/p>\n

It definitely involves freedom of information.<\/p>\n

And beyond that it wants to champion the provision of information to remove what biz school types would call asymmetry – in other words to stop institutions insider trading on information for their own political advantage at the expense of the public itself.<\/p>\n

Or doing the kind of stuff Tony Collins<\/span><\/a> documents so well (which actually is good-fashioned journalism).
<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Journalism has many bastard children: PR, marcomms, opinion polling. It\u2019s not proud of them, and they return the favour. So how about a chip off the old block that journalism could be proud of? A new discipline that journalism could pat kindly on the head. I’m talking about something deeply unsexy – public information. Now […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[466,344],"class_list":["post-459","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journalism","tag-public-info","tag-time"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=459"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=459"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}