Database journalism

Database journalism or structured journalism is a principle in information management whereby news content is organized around structured pieces of data, as opposed to news stories. See also Datajournalism

Communication scholar Wiebke Loosen defines database journalism as "supplying databases with raw material - articles, photos and other content - by using medium-agnostic publishing systems and then making it available for different devices."

Computer programmer Adrian Holovaty wrote what is now considered the manifesto of database journalism in September 2006. 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". For him, a key difference between database journalism and traditional journalism is that the latter produces articles 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. A December 2007 investigation by The 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 individual webpages or within articles.

The importance of database journalism was highlighted when the Knight Foundation awarded $1,100,000 to Adrian Holovaty's EveryBlock project, which offers local news at the level of city block, drawing from existing data. The Pulitzer prize received by the St. Petersburg Times' Politifact in April 2009 has been considered a Color of Money moment by Aron Pilhofer, head of the New York Times technology team. Referring to Bill Dedman's Pulitzer Prize-winning articles called The Color of Money, Pilhofer suggested that database journalism has been accepted by the trade and will develop, much like CAR did in the 1980s and 1990s.

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