Data journalism, data tools, and the newsroom stack by Alex Howard.
From the post:
MIT’s recent Civic Media Conference and the latest batch of Knight News Challenge winners made one reality crystal clear: as a new era of technology-fueled transparency, innovation and open government dawns, it won’t depend on any single CIO or federal program. It will be driven by a distributed community of media, nonprofits, academics and civic advocates focused on better outcomes, more informed communities and the new news, whatever form it is delivered in.
The themes that unite this class of Knight News Challenge winners were data journalism and platforms for civic connections. Each theme draws from central realities of the information ecosystems of today. Newsrooms and citizens are confronted by unprecedented amounts of data and an expanded number of news sources, including a social web populated by our friends, family and colleagues. Newsrooms, the traditional hosts for information gathering and dissemination, are now part of a flattened environment for news, where news breaks first on social networks, is curated by a combination of professionals and amateurs, and then analyzed and synthesized into contextualized journalism.
Pointers to the newest resources and analysis of the issues of “transparency, innovation and open government….”
Until government transparency becomes public and cumulative, it will be personal and transitory.
Topic maps have the capability to make it the former instead of the latter.