Key departures suggest 4 factors critical to the future of programming and journalism. Both Matt Waite and Jeremy Bowers are out at the St. Petersburg Times. Factors influencing data journalism at larger news organizations:
- News apps challenge longstanding perceptions of who owns technology within a media company.
- Regardless of who is placed in what department, developers and journalists must be able to collaborate so they can create new tools.
- News organizations will have to emphasize project management and product development if they hope to compete with digitally-native information companies.
- News organizations must truly support risk-taking in order to see its rewards.
Excellent state of the field analysis. All challenges to solve.
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Tools are nice, but remember that smart data structures are more important than smart applications. Mark up and store the data efficiently, and the processing / reuse will be simpler for everyone. Information Science has many nice flavors of punch: taxonomies, ontologies, natural language processing… 🙂