Guardian information architect Martin Belam blogs today about the latest in a series of talks at the newspaper about digital products and services.
In-house developer Daithí Ó Crualaoich worked with Belam on the inclusion of MusicBrainz IDs and ISBNs in the Guardian’s Open Platform API and has worked on some of the newspaper’s recent high profile datajournalism projects. Ó Crualaoich’s talk addressed the software development part of datajournalism.
He reminded the audience that software devs are not journalists. They have general purpose skills with software that can be turned to any processing function, like the controls on a washing machine, but they generally, he said, have very limited skills in understanding what makes a story into “a story” in the way that journalists process information. This means that to take part in these kinds of projects, software developers have to adapt their general purpose skills to focus on journalism.