Journalists should come to grips that working with databases and presenting that data in ways that help tell stories is very much a part of online journalism. In fact, it is probably the largest central component of quality online journalism currently. I can watch video on TV, I can read stories in print, but I can’t publish piles of raw data and make sense of it for my audience in either of those formats. Converged/multi media that is a patchwork quilt of platform agnostic content is not necessarily ground breaking online journalism. But what we can do with databases now that we a have a platform to open them up to audiences is nothing short of amazing. There can be no doubt that the most influential people in professional journalism today are the Adrian Holovatys of the world, or bloggers like Brian Stelter.

disclosure: i might also note that although i am now a journalism professor, my degrees are in anthropology.

The media job market is showing us this everyday. The people with skills in building rich applications with flash and actionscript or php/mysql or python or anything else are very much in demand. Writers are a dime a dozen, with a number of veteran scribes being laid off week after week and very poor prospects for freshly minted graduates who haven’t already broken in by self publishing their own blogs and building audience.

They used to say that online was a new ‘wild west.’ Back in the old days on the real frontier, the pioneer press papers were composed, typeset and printed by one or a handful of people who knew content, advertising and technology together. In many ways, the pendulum is swinging that way again.