An Informatics Model for News?

Dan Conover writes a consistently good blog about the future of journalism over at Xark!. This week, he wrote movingly about the future of journalism as an information product producer..

The future value of journalism -- what I contend will be the next successful evolutionary step in media development -- will be in creating information products based on thoughtful structures. That doesn't mean the end of narrative, or the end of the live report from the field, but it does mean that journalists will have to learn to view "their story" as a subset of a larger file that stores information in ways that machines can search for interesting patterns.

I call this The Informatics Model, and I think it sounds a lot more complex than it really is. But once we've established it, everyone will come to understand that the asset that journalism creates and owns is the structure in which it assembles and stores freely available (but expensive to gather) information. No individual fact has an appreciable value. The structure in which each resides, complete with metadata that tells us its "aboutness," will be the resource that we sell not only to news consumers, but to researchers, businesses, networks and specialized clients.

Give away the stories. Sell the structures.

Follow the link on The Informatics Model for a much more detailed exploration of what the idea means.

It's a provocative idea, and a somewhat troubling one. Among other things, it suggests that we should be training librarians and engineers to be journalists, instead of starting with writers. It also suggests that journalists are competing head-on with Google, in an effort to "organize the world's information". The image that leaps to mind there, unfortunately, is of John Henry with his hammer.