The rise of data (big and small) in journalism

NiemanJOurnalismLab reporting:
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier published their joint tome on big data this week, Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think. Mayer-Schönberger, a professor of Internet governance and regulation at Oxford, and Cukier, the data editor of The Economist, argue that having access to vast amounts of data will soon overwhelm our natural human tendency to look for correlation and causality where there is none. In the near future, we’ll be able to rely on much larger pools of “messy” data rather than small pools of “clean” data to get more accurate answers to our questions.
“We are taking things we never thought of as informational and rendering them in data,” Mayer-Schönberger said in a talk Wednesday at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard. “Once we think of it as data, we can organize it and extract new information.”
In their book, Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier give a number of examples of industries that will be changed forever by the new messiness of data. Bradford Cross cofounded FlightCaster.com, which predicted U.S. flight delays using data about flight times and weather patterns. The company was sold in 2011, at which point “Cross turned his sights on another aging industry.” He started Prismatic, one of a number of news aggregators that filters content for users by analyzing data about sharing frequency on social networks and user preferences. Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier write:
This is a humbling reminder to the high priests of mainstream media that the public is in aggregate more knowledgeable than they are, and that cuff linked journalists must compete against bloggers in their bathrobes. Yet the key point is that it is hard to imagine that Prismatic would have emerged from within the media industry itself, even though it collects lots of information. The regulars around the bar of the national Press Club never thought to reuse online data about media consumption. Nor might the analytics specialists in Armonk, New York or Bangalore, India have harnessed the information in this way. It took Cross, a louche outsider with disheveled hair and a slacker’s drawl, to presume that by using data he could tell the world what it ought pay attention to better than the editors of The New York Times...
http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/03/were-going-to-tell-people-how-to-interview-databases-the-rise-of-data-big-and-small-in-journalism/