Spurred on by positive reaction to my recent article on metadata, I did more digging in Twitter, and came across this interesting tweet from Christian Science Monitor librarian Leigh Montgomery (@CSMLibrary):

#Journalism future? ‘It’s in the data.’ #Metadata, that is – makes the #news last, rather than a perishable commodity http://tr.im/lmetadata
9:52 PM Jul 22nd from web

Montgomery brings an interesting perspective, with feet in the world of librarianship, where metadata has been a focus for a long time, and in journalism, which has only more recently begun to awaken to the value of metadata. Montgomery’s tweet links to a blog article (The Future, it’s in the Data) by journalist Carrie Brown-Smith (@Brizzyc), who interviewed Montgomery. Here’s an excerpt …

(quoting Montgomery) Librarians are precisely who have been leading in adding value and context to information … In all the ink and pixels spilled over the future of journalism I have not heard one mention of this … Information is valuable, and it needs structure, ­ keywording, and taxonomy added so it can be accessed, and repurposed.  All this is then repackaged and sold …

Brown-Smith also reports on a recent provocative article by journalist Dan Conover (@xarker) about the importance of adding data to news stories which could provide “a rich trove that could be mined to discover new connections and relationships.” (quote from Brown-Smith)

Conover’s article is a long and chatty discussion of metadata in journalism, and why news reporters resist adding it. He tells an interesting story of reporting on a house fire with and without metadata, and how coding can increase the future value of the work of reporting. He says that “the structure of [metadata] information is [now] the news organization’s primary product.” Unfortunately, though, he says, journalists hate the idea of adding this structured metadata — Why? …

Metadata coding is viewed as a library (or, in newsroom jargon, “morgue”) function … Journalism is a profession for storytellers, and our newsroom culture celebrates romantic myths that are generally hostile to structure. So I understand my curmudgeonly colleagues when they scoff behind my back at the word “metadata.”

I suspect that journalism is not the only profession that “celebrates romantic myths that are hostile to structure” 😉 … In journalism, as in publishing and libraries, discussed in my previous article, we’ve come to the interesting point when it’s the computer-library-coding geeks who will be, in Mike Cane’s words “the new publishers for a new age” … the ones who “make information do things.”

Eric Rumsey is @ericrumseytemp