Database journalism or structured journalism is a principle in
information management whereby news content is organized around structured pieces of
data
In the pursuit of knowledge, data (; ) is a collection of discrete Value_(semiotics), values that convey information, describing quantity, qualitative property, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of sy ...
, as opposed to news stories. See also
Data journalism
Data journalism or data-driven journalism (DDJ) is a journalistic process based on analyzing and filtering large data sets for the purpose of creating or elevating a news story.
Data journalism is a type of journalism reflecting the increased ...
Communication scholar Wiebke Loosen defines database journalism as "supplying
database
In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases s ...
s with raw material - articles, photos and other content - by using medium-agnostic
publishing systems and then making it available for different
devices."
History and development of database journalism
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
Article often refers to:
* Article (grammar), a grammatical element used to indicate definiteness or indefiniteness
* Article (publishing), a piece of nonfictional prose that is an independent part of a publication
Article may also refer to:
G ...
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
''The Washington Post'' (also known as the ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'') is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. It is the most widely circulated newspaper within the Washington metropolitan area and has a large nati ...
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
The ''Tampa Bay Times'', previously named the ''St. Petersburg Times'' until 2011, is an American newspaper published in St. Petersburg, Florida, United States. It has won fourteen Pulitzer Prizes since 1964, and in 2009, won two in a single ...
' Politifact in April 2009 has been considered a ''Color of Money'' moment by Aron Pilhofer, head of the
New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...
technology team. Referring to
Bill Dedman
Bill Dedman (born 1960) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist, an investigative reporter for '' Newsday'', and co-author of the biography of reclusive heiress Huguette Clark, '' Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark ...
'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.
Seeing journalistic content as data has pushed several news organizations to release
API
An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how ...
s, including the
BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC
Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board exam. ...
...
. 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. 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.
whereby journalists build stories using numerical data or databases as a primary material. In contrast, database journalism is an
for content. It focuses on the constitution and maintenance of the
can be built, and from which journalists can extract data to carry out data-driven stories.
's chicagocrime.org, released in 2005.