Are you ready to be a journalist of the future? Better get your head wrapped around the idea of data, then, says Sir Tim Berners-Lee – who, you know, invented the world wide web (which as you also know is not the same as the entire internet).
This morning at the release of huge tracts of government data about spending, a panel including Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude and Berners-Lee were asked who would analyse such data once the excited geeks had moved onto more interesting tasks (perhaps building the next Facebook).
Berners-Lee's response: "the responsibility needs to be with the press. Journalists need to be data-savvy. These are the people whose jobs are to interpret what government is doing to the people. So it used to be that you would get stories by chatting to people in bars, and it still might be that you'll do it that way some times. But now it's also going to be about poring over data and equipping yourself with the tools to analyse it and picking out what's interesting. And keeping it in perspective, helping people out by really seeing where it all fits together, and what's going on in the country."
"Data-driven journalism is the future," he concluded. To which his colleague Nigel Shadbolt, who with Berners-Lee has been working to get the civil service and local government to open up their data, added "Well, part of the future."
So – do you know what you need to know about working with data? Do you believe Berners-Lee? Given that the Guardian and the Telegraph have journalists who spend their entire time working on data, that the Times has its own labs, do you know your CSV from your RDF, your Python from your PHP, and would you know where to look for an API? Or is Berners-Lee being too geeky?