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May 27, 2015, 10:06 a.m.
Reporting & Production
LINK: twitter.com  ➚   |   Posted by: Joshua Benton   |   May 27, 2015

When Jacob Harris left The New York Times last month to work for the federal government at 18F — a sort of in-house digital consultancy to up the digital smarts of government — one could imagine the benefits of having a skilled data journalist now working on the inside. Someone who’d spent lots of time dealing with government data now might have a hand (however small — this is the federal government we’re talking about, after all) in improving the quality of that data. So it wasn’t too surprising to see him tweet this last night:

Data.gov is, of course, the feds’ open data portal: “Here you will find data, tools, and resources to conduct research, develop web and mobile applications, design data visualizations, and more.”

data-govHarris later clarified that he was asking for his “personal curiosity, not any work assignment.” But he nonetheless got an interesting range of responses — a sort of communal wish list from a group of (mostly) journalists about how government data could better serve their needs and the demands of transparency. Here are a few of the responses that stood out to me.

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Rise of the news DJs
“For an increasing subset of readers, ‘articles’ will be as invisible as CSS code.”
The future-of-journalism crowd stops ignoring local TV news
“The reality is that people of color in the U.S. are more likely to turn to TV news for local information than they are newspapers or digital-first local news.”
Journalism prepares for a post-search, post-social future
“The loss of reach for news publishers comes with a loss of visibility, which is likely to hit new, digital-born journalism organizations the hardest.”