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Congratulations to Computational Journalists on the 2008 Election
By BradStenger | October 31, 2008
On October 18 the San Francisco Chronicle declared a winner in the 2008 Presidential Election.
No matter which presidential candidate is elected on Nov. 4, there’s already a clear winner in the 2008 campaign season - Nate Silver, 30, the founder of polling analysis Web site FiveThirtyEight.com. (Poll analysis sites put new spin on statistics)
While Nate Silver was out there raising the bar, dozens, possibly hundreds, of other journalistically minded programmers, database experts, spreadsheet wizards, interaction designers, and infographic artists have worked tirelessly to generate insight and find truth amidst tidal waves of data surging through the super-pressured news cycles. Media historians will, I hope, notice that this election was the one when substantial, sophisticated data analysis and presentation grabbed hold of the conversation and became established social currency.
It’s hard to gauge what the world will look like on November 5. When you do something that has never been done before, you’re changed. Beat political reporters, the ones authoring post-election stories, will try to capture that feeling. The computer jockeys who have created this new world of journalism will live it. And they will, I expect, take their heightened skills, insight, and prominence and go after the next frontier in computing and journalism. That’s because they can’t stop. They don’t get to, at least not for long. While the political beat cycles down and its reporters enjoy extended down time, the lower profile computer folks will head back to their laptops and workstations to continue the revolution they’ve started.
To the computational journalists who worked so hard during this year’s election, thank you.
Topics: Information |