mattwaite.com

Mark Potts had some nice things to say about the new version of PolitiFact that we recently launched. But one of the things he wrote I wanted to amplify:

None of this really looks like traditional journalism. The Obameter doesn't follow conventional story formats in any way, and is really a hybrid between data, reporting, news and information presentation. We need to see a lot more of this. There are a many different ways to tell a story, especially online, and the more experimentation we see with journalism forms, the faster the state of the art will evolve and thrive.

PolitiFact may not look like tradional journalism, but it very much is. It's a story type that's been around for decades, a type of accountability journalism that's been around much longer than that. The difference is that we aren't just creating a field for a headline and a field for a story and calling it quits. The difference is that we view content as data and the database as an act of journalism in itself. Each promise in the database is a piece of journalism and a piece of data. And all the acts of journalism that combine to make up the database form one meta act of journalism. But without using data as an organizing principle, most of what makes PolitiFact more than just a collection of stories would be impossible.

I see too much "innovation" going on far away from the core product -- Video! Twitter! Social Networks! -- and not enough innovation happening at the atomic level of journalism -- the story. Yeah, yeah, I know: your CMS sucks, it won't do anything, blah blah blah. We're going to ride that excuse right into the grave. Well, if newsroom content systems can't do it, it's time to start building new structures for stories and ripping that content right out of the hands of the CMS.

Comments

Chris Amico's comment on Jan. 20, 2009 3:51 p.m.

Hey Matt,

I'm curious about the workflow behind the Obameter.

I was flipping through Obama's promises this morning after the inauguration and it started to dawn on me just how broad a subject it is to follow a president's promises, something that seems, at least when I think about it, vastly different from checking statements as they happen.

Checking statements seems a mostly linear process: a politician says something, it's checked, and the ruling is posted.

The promises you're now following were all made during the campaign, and they'll be fulfilled (or not) over the course of the next four years, with no real schedule or linearity. I'm curious how reporters are approaching the task, as well as what can be done on the technical side to make the process easier.

Btw, good to see the site back up again.

Matt Waite's comment on Jan. 24, 2009 3:36 p.m.

Chris,

You're right -- we talked a lot about the enormity of the whole thing and had a lot of honest conversations about if we were even going to do it. In the end, obviously, we decided to do it.

The workflow is actually pretty typical -- we've divided up the promises, creating something akin to beats out of them. Then, in the database, not visible to the outside, are two fields -- a notes field and a date field, which amounts to a reminder field. We're using those fields to help us keep track of things -- when to next check in on things, who to contact, what to look for next, etc. It all came together pretty fast, and we probably could have done more with it, but that's what we came up with.