The “Journalism is broken” cry is not a new one, especially with the rise of citizen journalism, loss of readership and viewership etc.

So when a Journalist / programmer (an unusual combination of skills, don’t you agree?) tries to fix this crisis, it’s worth paying some attention. Adrian Holovaty has an idea of how to use the ‘data’ of a story to come up with a better narrative. Listen to him here

To me this approach is interesting not because I am a writer of business stories but because of where I work.

Data is the basis of every decision we make, whether we call it that or not. At the Decision Theater we take data and help create a narrative for policy makers to see what’s often invisible –either too complex to fathom, or simply buried in plain sight by a data smog. Data, once you connect the dots, could be used to construct scenarios. There is a whole lot of programming, data selection, data mining and layering at the back end. But the scenario shows up as a richer story. It is maybe about a discrete event, but it could have a wider relevance.

The news media is grappling with that same choices between creating the thumbnail or the sound bite versus giving people the context. Giving readers (and this applies to viewers, listeners, browsers) the former is easy, but like the evening TV news that packs a world event into a few seconds, the ‘story’ is crippled because it is data poor. The latter cannot be banged out on a word processor that easily.

The data-rich story needs a programmer’s mindset.