Database journalism or structured journalism is a principle in information management whereby news content is organized around structured pieces of data, as opposed to news stories.
Communication scholar Wiebke Loosen defines database journalism as "supplying databases with raw material - articles, photos and other content - by using medium-agnostic publishing systems and then making it available for different devices."
Some argue that such organization allows for a more efficient workflow. Reginald Chua, Editor of data and innovation at Thomson Reuters, talk of structured journalism as a means to "maximize the shelf-life of news content" and "extracting more value" out of content.
Computer programmer Adrian Holovaty wrote what is now considered the manifesto of database journalism in September 2006. In this article, Holovaty explained that most material collected by journalists is "structured information: the type of information that can be sliced-and-diced, in an automated fashion, by computers". For him, a key difference between database journalism and traditional journalism is that the latter produces articles as the final product while the former produces databases of facts that are continually maintained and improved.
Seymour (Sy) Myron Hersh (born April 8, 1937) is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and author based in Washington, D.C. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine on military and security matters. He has also won two National Magazine Awards and is a "five-time Polk winner and recipient of the 2004 George Orwell Award."
He first gained worldwide recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai Massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. His 2004 reports on the US military's mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison gained much attention.
Simon Rogers is a British musician and composer, notable for his chart success both as a musician and as a producer as well as for his considerable portfolio of television soundtrack work.
In 1976, Rogers entered the Royal College of Music, London, later becoming an associate (ARCM) and winning their guitar prize in 1980. Upon leaving he joined Ballet Rambert’s Mercury Ensemble as their guitarist. During this period he composed several ballet scores, including Entre Dos Aguas and Fabrications for London Contemporary Dance Theatre. He also made his first commercial hit, joining the South American folk music group Incantation who enjoyed some UK and international chart success in the early 1980s, their best known single being "Cacharpaya". In 1985 Simon left both Rambert and Incantation and joined legendary post-punk group The Fall, initially as bassist, then subsequently on guitar and keyboards. He produced their top 20 album The Frenz Experiment (1988) before parting company with the group. During this period, he also produced two albums for Bauhaus singer Peter Murphy.
Jeremy Scahill (born c. 1974) is an American investigative journalist and author whose work focuses on the use of private military companies. He is the author of the best-selling book Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, winner of a George Polk Book Award. He also serves as a correspondent for the U.S. radio and TV program Democracy Now!. Scahill is a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute and a frequent contributor to The Nation.
Scahill is from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Scahill started his career as an unpaid intern at Democracy Now!. While there he learned the technical side of radio, and learned "journalism as a trade, rather than an academic study."
He campaigned vigorously against US policy towards Cuba, arguing that the Helms-Burton Act "discards ... sovereignty ... and attempts to supersede International law with US law" and "creates a legal framework authorizing financial and military support for armed subversion of a sovereign nation".
Scahill and colleague Amy Goodman were co-recipients of the 1998 Polk Award for their radio documentary "Drilling and Killing: Chevron and Nigeria's Oil Dictatorship", which investigated the Chevron Corporation's role in the killing of two Nigerian environmental activists. Scahill has written extensively on national security issues and the military-industrial complex. His work appears frequently in Commondreams, Truthout, Huffington Post, Alternet, CounterPunch, and many other news sites.