Database journalism or structured journalism is a principle in

information management Information management (IM) is the appropriate and optimized capture, storage, retrieval, and use of information. It may be personal information management or organizational. Information management for organizations concerns a cycle of organiz ...

whereby news content is organized around structured pieces of

data Data ( , ) are a collection of discrete or continuous values that convey information, describing the quantity, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of symbols that may be further interpreted for ...

, as opposed to news stories. See also

Data journalism Data journalism or data-driven journalism (DDJ) is journalism based on the filtering and analysis of large data sets for the purpose of creating or elevating a news story. Data journalism reflects the increased role of numerical data in the p ...

Communication scholar Wiebke Loosen defines database journalism as "supplying

database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data or a type of data store based on the use of a database management system (DBMS), the software that interacts with end users, applications, and the database itself to capture and a ...

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 Adrian Holovaty (born 1981) is an American web developer, musician and entrepreneur from Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, living in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He is co-creator of the Django (web framework), Django web framework and an advocate of "jou ...

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 ''The Washington Post'', locally known as ''The'' ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'' or ''WP'', is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C., the national capital. It is the most widely circulated newspaper in the Washington m ...

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 The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, also known as the Knight Foundation, is an American non-profit foundation that provides grants for journalism, communities, and the arts. The organization was founded as the Knight Memorial Education ...

awarded $1,100,000 to Adrian Holovaty's EveryBlock project, which offers local news at the level of

city block A city block, residential block, urban block, or simply block is a central element of urban planning and urban design. In a city with a grid system, the block is the smallest group of buildings that is surrounded by streets. City blocks are th ...

, 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 ''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...

technology team. Referring to

Bill Dedman Bill Dedman is an American investigative reporter and author. He is best known for ''The Color of Money'', his 1988 investigation of redlining of middle-income black neighborhoods by banks and other mortgage lenders. Dedman received the 1989 Pu ...

'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 A car, or an automobile, is a motor vehicle with wheels. Most definitions of cars state that they run primarily on roads, seat one to eight people, have four wheels, and mainly transport people rather than cargo. There are around one billio ...

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 connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how to build ...

s, including the

BBC The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster headquartered at Broadcasting House in London, England. Originally established in 1922 as the British Broadcasting Company, it evolved into its current sta ...

, the Guardian, the

and the American

National Public Radio National Public Radio (NPR) is an American public broadcasting organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., with its NPR West headquarters in Culver City, California. It serves as a national Radio syndication, syndicator to a network of more ...

. 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.

Difference with data-driven journalism

Data-driven journalism is a

process A process is a series or set of activities that interact to produce a result; it may occur once-only or be recurrent or periodic. Things called a process include: Business and management * Business process, activities that produce a specific s ...

whereby journalists build stories using numerical data or databases as a primary material. In contrast, database journalism is an

organizational structure An organizational structure defines how activities such as task allocation, coordination, and supervision are directed toward the achievement of organizational aims. Organizational structure affects organizational action and provides the found ...

for content. It focuses on the constitution and maintenance of the

upon which

web Web most often refers to: * Spider web, a silken structure created by the animal * World Wide Web or the Web, an Internet-based hypertext system Web, WEB, or the Web may also refer to: Computing * WEB, a literate programming system created by ...

mobile applications A mobile application or app is a computer program or software application designed to run on a mobile device such as a phone, tablet, or watch. Mobile applications often stand in contrast to desktop applications which are designed to run on d ...

can be built, and from which journalists can extract data to carry out data-driven stories.

Examples of database journalism

Early projects in this new database journalism were

mySociety mySociety is a UK-based registered charity, previously named UK Citizens Online Democracy. It began as a UK-focused organisation with the aim of making online democracy tools for UK citizens. However, those tools were open source, so that th ...

in the UK, launched in 2004, and

's chicagocrime.org, released in 2005.

Announcing chicagocrime.org
/ref> As of 2011, several databases could be considered journalistic in themselves. They include EveryBlock,

OpenCorporates OpenCorporates is a website that shares data on corporations under the copyleft Open Database Licence, Open Database License. The company, OpenCorporates Ltd, was incorporated on 18 December 2010 by Chris Taggart and Rob McKinnon, and the websit ...

, and Govtrack.us.

History and development of database journalism

Difference with data-driven journalism

Examples of database journalism

References

See also