The Necessity of Data Journalism in the New Digital Community

Mediashift reporting:
 This is the second post in a series from Nicholas White, the co-founder and CEO of The Daily Dot.
It used to be, to be a good reporter, all you had to do was get drunk with the right people.
Sure, it helped if you could string a few words together, but what was really important was that when news broke, you could get the right person on the phone and get the skinny. Or when something scandalous was going down somewhere, someone would pick up the phone and call you.
Increasingly today, in selecting and training reporters, the industry seems to focus on the stringing-words-together part. (If CJR wants to study something, I suggest comparing alcohol consumption among newsroom employees and circulation. Both have been dropping steadily since the '70s. Coincidence? I think not.)
That's not how we're building our newsroom at The Daily Dot. Don't get me wrong, we want people who can write, but that's not actually our first -- or only -- criterion. While it's still early days, we've done at least two things that are very exciting and critical to our long-term success -- and they're not things that should remain unique to us. I think they point toward the future success of the industry as a whole.
One: Our very first newsroom hire, after our executive editor, was Grant Robertson, who's not only a reporter and an editor, but also a programmer. Two: We have, in partnership with the math whizzes at Ravel, analyzed the Reddit and Tumblr communities, ranking their users on a variety of metrics tracking activity, engagement and influence.
We found it necessary to push early in this direction because of our unique coverage area and we're in the fortunate position of being able to build our newsroom from scratch.
http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2011/06/the-necessity-of-data-journalism-in-the-new-digital-community173.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+pbs%2Fmediashift-blog+%28mediashift-blog%29