I’ll again point you to part 3 of Mindy McAdams’ exceptional series Making Online Journalism about skills that will be needed in the future for online journalism. I’ll also add one to her list: knowledge of databases. More below the fold.
#

If you’ve paid attention to the recent announcement by Gannett that it is going to be restructuring its newsrooms into “information centers,” you’d hear a lot of sound and fury about the notion of “crowdsourcing” the news (see related coverage at crowdsourcing.com). But an equally important part of the announcement was the emphasis on leveraging local information (“hyperlocal,” in web 2.0-speak). The key to that information is found in databases. Here’s a relevant quote from crowdsourcing.com author Jeff Howe: #

As Gregory Korte, the Cincinnati Enquirer reporter noted in my Wired News piece, “The newspaper of the future is going to need more programmers than copy editors, and we’re going to have to figure out how to make that transition.” The only change I’d make to that quote is to strike “programmers” and sub in “database managers.” Gannett exec Michael Maness told me that newsrooms might discover that the folks in research library departments might find themselves well-suited to this new kind of newsroom. #

If I were a journalist in training, I’d definitely be learning how databases operate, and how the information contained in them can be pulled out and presented in different ways. They run your content management system, they power “mashups” of geographical data, they are used for online surveys, and they collect little league scores. One of the most common is MySQL, an open-source database (don’t get a programmer started on the various “flavors” of open-source databases!).
Again, even if you as a journalist don’t build a database yourself, knowing how they operate and how they can be used will help you conceive of new and creative uses for database information within your operation. And that, ultimately, increases your value to the company and your future value should you decide to move to another company. #

Examples of creative database mashups: chicagocrime.org, faces of the fallen, barista teardown map, U.S. congress votes database. #

#