information analyst

As Tim O’Reilly tweeted last week, “Data Science is the new black.” Data has definitely got people talking, and thinking, and rethinking the implications, and that includes a growing number of leading journalists and journalism schools…and media funders.

 

Consider just three recent happenings:

-Earlier this year, data camps were held at both Columbia University and University of Texas.
-At the Mozilla Festival in London late last year, a team of developers, designers, and digital journalists set out to write the first Data Journalism Handbook.
-Just last month, the Global Editors Network announced the first data journalism awards.

 

Read the complete article for more on data journalism...

Via Lauren Moss

This piece was written by Eric Brown for social media explorer.

 

I selected this article because it reaffirms what many of us already know but it's still good to see this in writing: Content curation and Media Curation (a mix of  machine aggregation and Human Curation) are starting to pick up steam.

 

Here are some highlights:

 

Curation comes up when search stops working,” says author and NYU Professor Clay Shirky. But it’s more than a human-powered filter.

 

**“Curation comes up when people realize that it isn’t just about information seeking, it’s also about synchronizing a community.”

 

The author says and I agree with him:

 

 

**"The value will be in the expertise of the curator, people will not read junk, and the best of the best curators will create digital domination with vibrant communities".

 

There is also a great quote from Fred Wilson's AVB blog in which he details what he would do if he were starting the Village Voice now:

 

**I would not print anything. I would not hire a ton of writers. I would build a website and a mobile app (or two or three). I would hire a Publisher and a few salespeople.

 

**I would hire an editor and a few journalists. And then I’d go out and find every blog, twitter, facebook, flickr, youtube, and other social media feed out there that is related to downtown NYC

 

**and I would pull it all into an aggregation system where my editor and journalists could cull through the posts coming in, curate them, and then publish them

 

Curated by Jan Gordon covering "Content Curation, Social Business and Beyond"

 

Read full article: [http://bit.ly/kmZvJg]

 

Via janlgordon

Robin Good curated this piece and has some very interesting observations in addition the article.

 

 

Mathew Ingram makes a great point in this post I discovered thanks to Morten Myrstad: one way for Media groups to re-invent themselves is to think of themselves as data platforms and not newspapers any more.

 

 

Great point.

 

But I see one more: opening up to other news platforms too even if competing.

 

I appreciate this clearly faces cultural resistance but if you think of it really as a platform, you shouldn't be afraid to interface it with your competitors' just like Twitter has a LinkedIn App.

 

One missed opportunity I see that reflects this is the WSJ Facebook App: it's a great concept to let your readers remix the headlines but why not do it with non-WSJ content too? I'd love to see through a crowd sourced effort from the most WSJ active readers and curators how some WSJ-news relate to other news from say the FT or the Economist.

 

I’m going to make my music-industry analogy again (can’t escape my background…) but right now media groups think of building a record store or a radio station with their own artists. Imagine a radio that would play only Universal Music Group artists? It would suck, right? Yet, that’s what most media are today.

 

Don't you think the industry needs bold moves like this?

Via The New Company, Guillaume Decugis, Robin Good, janlgordon