News as structured data

Super-smart-guy Adrian Holovaty renews his call for rethinking the "output" of journalism as structured data:

"So much of what local journalists collect day-to-day is structured information: the type of information that can be sliced-and-diced, in an automated fashion, by computers. Yet the information gets distilled into a big blob of text -- a newspaper story -- that has no chance of being repurposed."

The best chance for the kinds of changes Holovaty suggests to occur is at that tipping point where news reports start being prepared first and foremost for interactive media, not for the legacy media that drove the establishment of current prose formats and techniques.

I believe the same notion applies to video, once the Internet becomes the distribution vehicle of record. Why produce TV-style, single-timeline video segments -- with on-air "talent" doing intros and voice-overs and lower-third graphics identifying people and places -- when simply edited video of stuff actually happening, or newsmakers actually saying newsmaking things, could be displayed alongside metadata (time, date, place etc.) in a browser?

Advertising? Same deal. The many messages in a typical quarter-page ad could be structured to serve interactive users (and current and potential customers for the advertiser) much better. Won't happen until ads are produced for interactive first.

And none of those tipping points will be reached until (a) consumer audiences and (b) advertising dollars abandon the legacy media en masse. We're seeing interactive audience growth, and ad spending growth, but it's only chipping away at the legacy media. The dam is holding for now. And that's slowing the pace of needed changes such as what Holovaty suggests.