In the 21st century, a crack reporter's best source for juicy leads might not be pounding the pavement and hounding sources. Instead, it might be an algorithm that gathers the information hidden in documents and data sets and displays them in an eureka-inspiring format. To that end, Google and the Knight Foundation recently announced millions of dollars in grants to digital journalism projects, with the overarching goal of funneling the firehose of new data into an easily digestible format.
One of the awards went to The Chicago Tribune's "PANDA," which aims to sew otherwise incompatible datasets together, allowing journalists to find unknown relationships from the archived data that normally sits dormant on individual hard drives.
