Journalism Becomes Data-driven

Chapter nine in Mark Brigg’s book highlights the importance of digitizing your life and organizing the information you collect. Briggs brings the readers attention to the chaotic disarray of our email inboxes. We can take advantage of organizational tools such as filters and folders to restore an order to our email programs.

Briggs compares the capabilities of technology to driving a car. He says that no matter how cool the car is or how many gizmos it has, the driver makes the decisions that matter.

There are several simple things we can do to ensure that our email programs operate smoothly and effectively. Briggs would like journalists to commit to a few time-saving rules to manage an email account, and they are as simple as just reducing the amount of time your email program is open on your screen. Briggs says to focus time on something else for an hour or two before launching your email again. It can be beneficial to address new messages every time you sign onto email in order to prevent distractions from new messages.

David Allen’s “Getting Things Done,” book offers many lessons and suggestions on how to manage this ocean of data. Journalists have to develop a strategy beginning with a simple equation. (What you need to manage + the right tools to manage it= personal productivity.

Journalist should be familiar with online data basses because they can be useful for journalism. Spreadsheets and other forms of structured or fielded data allow journalist to develop stories according to statistical information. IN the book Briggs provides an example of a spreadsheet from “USA Today,” containing the median and annual salaries for the Chicago Cubs from 2009-1992.  This is just a basic example of how data collecting tools can make it easier to manage information.

Every story is a field of data, reporters are going to gather information while researching and when data is organized it saves everyone time.