The
current issue of WIRED (or is it only the online WIRED News?  I'm
not always sure which is which.) carrieds a piece on what Amazon is
doing with its search engines to tease data out of the PDF books it
carries.  “Judging a Book by its Contents”
includes the following from Amazon exec. Bill Carr.  Oh that news
organizations could bring the same type of thinking to their archives.

Bill Carr, Amazon's executive vice president of digital media, confirms that this is a serious attempt to sell more books.

“We've been spending a lot of time thinking, 'We have this rich digital
content, how can we pull info out and expose it to customers that makes
discovery even better?'” Carr said. “What you are seeing here are the
fruits of a lot experimenting and brainstorming.”

Carr points to the “adaptive unconscious” SIP from Malcolm Gladwell's best seller, Blink, as an example of how improbable data mining can get a curious reader into the long tail of Amazon's catalog.”

Benjamin Vershbow, a researcher at the Institute for the Future of the Book,”…sees Amazon's data mining as part of a trend on the web where sites are
learning to weave data sources together to create a new web experience.”

Someone, and it won't be a newspaper or magazine
publisher, will see an opportunity to do the same thing with our
archives.  No, Lexis-Nexis is just a warehouse.  Valuable,
but not much added value.

Our friend Barbara Semonche, news researcher extraordinaire, makes the following post to the NewLib listserv:

“If our NewsLib subscribers
are interested in the fulltext of the Coleman and Wilkins research on
journalists' ethics (published in the Autumn 2004 issue of Journalism
& Mass Communication Quarterly) here is the direct

URL: http://www.aejmc.org/pubs/jmcqaut04/coleman.pdf



     “Makes for
rather provocative reading in some respects. An example: this research
mentions two variables — investigative reporting and civic journalism
— as having been linked to moral development in journalists in
qualitative work. The  researchers in their literature review
mention studies that have
shown investigative  reporters to make moral decisions regarding
wrongdoing then abandon objectivity to push for public good, serve as
moral judges, and deal with ethical issues more than other types of
reporters. Hmmmmmm.”

One
of the things we've learned in the past decade is that journalists and
police departments often are asking the same questions and use — or
could use — many of the same methods to analyze data.  In fact,
we would argue that crime analysts and criminologists are doing some of
the best work in the social sciences today. 

One of
the issues of import to both professions is racial profiling.  A
recent publication from the U.S. Dept. of Justice suggests some methods
for analyzing the that data.

A Suggested Approach to Analyzing Racial
Profiling: Sample Templates for Analyzing Car-Stop Data

Source: U.S. Department of Justice, Office
of Community Oriented Policing Services

A Suggested Approach to Analyzing Racial
Profiling: Sample Templates for Analyzing Car-Stop Data (PDF; 468 KB)

“Decisions regarding the merits of
racial profiling concerns are important and should not be based on either
anecdotal evidence or incomplete analysis. Evaluating the extent and nature of
police profiling patterns may lead to decisions regarding proper training and
appropriate police tactics. It is crucial that such evaluations rely on
appropriate methodological approaches, objectively obtained data, and
appropriate benchmarks or comparison guidelines.“

Newspapers may need to move back into the future to avoid extinction.

Kids dissing newspapers