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What sort of news journalism might emerge over coming years? Adrian Holovaty predicts the end of some current practices. (Thanks to Rohan Jayasekera for the link). Adrian observes that journalists are conditioned by established practices to always gather information towards an amorphous lump of words called a newspaper story:

The problem here is that, for many types of news and information, newspaper stories don’t cut it anymore.

So much of what local journalists collect day-to-day is structured information: the type of information that can be sliced-and-diced, in an automated fashion, by computers. Yet the information gets distilled into a big blob of text - a newspaper story - that has no chance of being repurposed.

When he says ‘repurposed’, Holovaty isn’t talking about RSS or putting the content on mobile phones. He means that the atoms of the event/story could be identified and potentially recombined to suit a multitude of purposes. Any given story has attributes - places, people, dates, types of event - that could be tagged and recorded systematically.

A story about a burglary, for example, could automatically be added to ongoing, currently unwritten stories about where and when burglaries take place, presence and type of alarm, modes of entry, types of victim and perpetrator. At the moment, because newspapers’ basic unit of currency is the story, it’s almost impossible to extract this sort of information. The focus on stories represents a ‘lost opportunity’ for shared research, re-use and the discovery of those hidden stories that lie between the experiences of many journalists.

Adrian doesn’t mention the words semantic or microformats, but it’s fairly clear that he’s talking about a semantic news. If news stories were machine-readable, then fairly labour-intensive tasks such as “what’s the weather likely to be on election day, and what effect will this have on voter turnout” could be a piece of cake.

I don’t think the news story is quite dead yet. People prefer a story to a heap of facts. It helps us to contextualise events, to decide what’s important and worth caring about. We need people (journalists and editors) working full time on connecting and narrativising (if that’s a word) the things that happen because we haven’t got time to do it ourselves. It takes time, brain power and imagination to work out that there might be a connection between different phenomenon, to establish the links and to present the results as a digestible whole.

However, this more semantic approach to news gathering would make it possible to produce more in-depth, factually rich stories more easily. And make pursuing stories based on a hunch quickly proven or disproved without wasting anyone’s time. That’s good news for journalists, news publishers and the public.