More On Newspapers

I love philosophy.

More than that, I love theory and analysis. It was once suggested to me that I'm not really a philosopher, but a theorist, and I think there's a lot of truth to that.

This piece from Adrian Holovaty provides lots of analysis (and a little bit of theory). And it's about newspapers. What's not to like?

For example:

Let me clarify. I don't mean "Display a newspaper story on a cell phone." I don't mean "Display a newspaper story in RSS." I don't mean "Display a newspaper story on my PDA." Those are fine goals, but they're examples of changing the format, not the information itself. Repurposing and aggregating information is a different story, and it requires the information to be stored atomically -- and in machine-readable format.

For example, say a newspaper has written a story about a local fire. Being able to read that story on a cell phone is fine and dandy. Hooray, technology! But what I really want to be able to do is explore the raw facts of that story, one by one, with layers of attribution, and an infrastructure for comparing the details of the fire -- date, time, place, victims, fire station number, distance from fire department, names and years experience of firemen on the scene, time it took for firemen to arrive -- with the details of previous fires. And subsequent fires, whenever they happen.

That is genius. Why hasn't this happened yet?

Except, of course, that is has - sort of. Anybody heard of, I don't know, Google Earth? I know it doesn't necessarily track the exact types of information that he's talking about, but it's a very well-known tool for doing the same type of thing. And I'm sure that there are plenty more tools of this type - database, aggregating, and mapping, as well as adding features like keywords, geographic locators and a halfway decent search engine. Hell, even Flickr lets users map their photos to geographic locations.

The more I think about it, the more I'm surprised Google hasn't actually done this yet, combining Google News and Google Earth. I wonder if Google News doesn't have the capacity at the hyperlocal level to do this (and I agree with Holovaty that the hyperlocal level is where this is the most useful).

I am so drooling with desire right now. Imagine this: Want to track your son's summer baseball league? Go to the local newspaper website. You could do stats and results, browse news stories about the games, and view the games via location - including breaking down stats by location, time, etc. It's not rocket science; in the case of baseball, I bet this is already being done, but probably just for the majors, minors, and maybe college ball. All it needs is a few very enterprising programmers to come along and create an (open source, please) template for this which local newspapers can then adapt for their own use.

Holovaty spends some time discussing why this would be a good idea for a newspaper to follow up on, and how this relates to/is journalism. I want to excerpt one point, because I think it nails the local papers and their use of the Internet to the wall (the possible exception being the G-T and Theresa Hogue's use of podcasts):

But the goal for me, a data person focused more on the long term, is to store information in the most valuable format possible. The problem is particularly frustrating to explain because it's not necessarily obvious; if you store everything on your Web site as a news article, the Web site is not necessarily hard to use. Rather, it's a problem of lost opportunity. If all of your information is stored in the same "news article" bucket, you can't easily pull out just the crimes and plot them on a map of the city. You can't easily grab the events to create an event calendar. You end up settling on the least common denominator: a Web site that knows how to display one type of content, a big blob of text. That Web site cannot do the cool things that readers are beginning to expect.

Sigh. I can't wait. Of course, I also don't expect the owner of the local papers to actually implement any of this in my lifetime. The three websites are all cloned from the same template, and it's not a good one. When it comes to multimedia and the use of the Internet, the Daily Barometer is years ahead of the local "real" newspapers.