Institute for Analytic Journalism

The current issue of WIRED (or is it only the online WIRED News? I'm not always sure which is which.) carrieds a piece on what Amazon is doing with its search engines to tease data out of the PDF books it carries. "Judging a Book by its Contents" includes the following from Amazon exec. Bill Carr. Oh that news organizations could bring the same type of thinking to their archives.

Bill Carr, Amazon's executive vice president of digital media, confirms that this is a serious attempt to sell more books.

"We've been spending a lot of time thinking, 'We have this rich digital content, how can we pull info out and expose it to customers that makes discovery even better?'" Carr said. "What you are seeing here are the fruits of a lot experimenting and brainstorming."

Carr points to the "adaptive unconscious" SIP from Malcolm Gladwell's best seller, Blink, as an example of how improbable data mining can get a curious reader into the long tail of Amazon's catalog."

Benjamin Vershbow, a researcher at the Institute for the Future of the Book,"...sees Amazon's data mining as part of a trend on the web where sites are learning to weave data sources together to create a new web experience."

Someone, and it won't be a newspaper or magazine publisher, will see an opportunity to do the same thing with our archives. No, Lexis-Nexis is just a warehouse. Valuable, but not much added value.

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Ethics of Journalists

by JTJ on Thu 05 May 2005 03:31 PM MDT

Our friend Barbara Semonche, news researcher extraordinaire, makes the following post to the NewLib listserv:

"If our NewsLib subscribers are interested in the fulltext of the Coleman and Wilkins research on journalists' ethics (published in the Autumn 2004 issue of Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly) here is the direct
URL: http://www.aejmc.org/pubs/jmcqaut04/coleman.pdf

"Makes for rather provocative reading in some respects. An example: this research mentions two variables -- investigative reporting and civic journalism -- as having been linked to moral development in journalists in qualitative work. The researchers in their literature review mention studies that have shown investigative reporters to make moral decisions regarding wrongdoing then abandon objectivity to push for public good, serve as moral judges, and deal with ethical issues more than other types of reporters. Hmmmmmm."

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Analyzing Racial Profiling

by JTJ on Thu 05 May 2005 01:25 PM MDT

One of the things we've learned in the past decade is that journalists and police departments often are asking the same questions and use -- or could use -- many of the same methods to analyze data. In fact, we would argue that crime analysts and criminologists are doing some of the best work in the social sciences today.
One of the issues of import to both professions is racial profiling. A recent publication from the U.S. Dept. of Justice suggests some methods for analyzing the that data.

A Suggested Approach to Analyzing Racial Profiling: Sample Templates for Analyzing Car-Stop Data

Source: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Community Oriented Policing Services

"Decisions regarding the merits of racial profiling concerns are important and should not be based on either anecdotal evidence or incomplete analysis. Evaluating the extent and nature of police profiling patterns may lead to decisions regarding proper training and appropriate police tactics. It is crucial that such evaluations rely on appropriate methodological approaches, objectively obtained data, and appropriate benchmarks or comparison guidelines."

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