News as Data and the Future of Newspapers

News as Data

When we talk about news as data, many people will think it means 'big data', the new buzzword that is flying around pointing to the promised land of yet to be defined data. And while the concept of big data is very interesting, it's mostly interesting for big-data companies, and not so much for newspapers.

You see, the very concept of big data is that its purpose is to explain itself. It's hugely interesting for analysts, but journalists cannot really contribute much to it. Then we have the notion that journalists can use big data to 'do something', but big data is a long-tail concept, and most newspapers focus their stories on the short head.

So I will leave the concept of big data to another time in another report.

When I talk about news as data in this report, I mean the shift that we see from news being reported by people, to news being reported as data.

Let me give you three examples that illustrate the shift:

Cruise Ship

Remember back in January 2012 when the cruise ship Costa Concordia ran aground off the coast of Tuscany Italy?

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