Invisible Inkling

Ryan Sholin on the future of newspapers, online news and journalism education.

All About databases

The stenography ends here

A few takeaways from this morning’s presentations at the Knight Foundation meeting today in Chicago:

The stenography ends here. The days of chasing cops and government down for raw data (crime blotter, etc.) to parse into 8 inch stories is coming to an end.  Everyblock and the Sunlight Foundation are a good start.  More projects that [...]

Inventing journalism

I’ve been reading Guns, Germs & Steel for months now.
(I take these bound paper items you people call ‘books’ slowly sometimes.)
There’s a number of striking stories about technology, innovation, and invention in the chapter I’m in the middle of right now. One of those stories is about the QWERTY keyboard layout, which was actually [...]

If you can’t beat ‘em, or buy ‘em, use the API

Newspapers should produce amazing local databases with great maps, ratings and reviews.
A newspaper company should buy Yelp.
Yelp now has an open API. Newspapers should stop trying to develop something better, and use the API to provide users with Yelp’s functionality on their own sites, applied to their local businesses.
Apply that logic everywhere it makes sense. [...]

An informal poll on what I should learn next

Here’s what I don’t know, no matter what it says on my resume: How to work in SQL and PHP from scratch, javascript, Django, Ruby, Flash, Illustrator, how to use maps APIs to code my own mashups, how to present databases online.

Why wouldn’t a journalist leave his job at the newspaper for the online newspaper?

Derek Willis, who blogs at The Scoop about investigative and computer-assisted reporting, announces his move from The Washington Post to…
…washingtonpost.com.
The online operation of the paper happens across the river from the newsroom, with a different set of employees and editors, and Derek has taken the step of packing up his skills and crossing over to [...]