It’s a hot topic among journalists right now: Is data journalism? Is it journalism to publish a raw database? Here, at last, is the definitive, two-part answer: 1. Who cares? 2. I hope my competitors waste their time arguing about this as long as possible.

— Adrian Holovaty, founder of EveryBlock.com, in a post on his personal blog

They predict a service that strips locations, names, and other facts from stories and uses them to personalize the news. They predict user-generated content produced by the masses and users broadcasting short snippets about their lives for the whole world. Sound familiar?

Googlezon isn’t all that different than what Facebook does – stripping elements from changes in a user’s online presence and turning them into lines in other users’ “News feeds.” And the masses are already generating plenty of user content in the form of photos (Flickr), videos (YouTube) and commentary (Blogger).

These technologies have yet to touch the journalism industry on a broad scale, though. For an example of how it might in the future look to EveryBlock. EveryBlock is currently in 15 cities (including Dallas), and was just purchased by MSNBC.com. It takes public information from restaurant inspections to crimes and turns them into interactive maps and charts that users can filter down to the block level. It also strips locations from news stories and alerts users to news stories that involve their neighborhoods.

EveryBlock founder Adrian Holovaty, by Flickr user Matt Biddulph

Because EveryBlock is largely automated it can cover large areas with extreme depth; it can report on every crime in every neighborhood, something no newspaper or TV station can do. It’s a brand of journalism that the site’s founder, Adrian Holovaty, calls “microlocal” news.

The site plays off of standardized digital data sets made available by government agencies, and talented programmers who can pull off fancy repurposing of that data, but Holovaty says a great deal of news content is ripe for the same time of application.

Here’s one of his examples (great link) of how a traditional story is still composed of many pieces of data: “A wedding announcement is about a couple, with a wedding date, engagement date, bride, hometown, groom hometown and various other happy, flowery pieces of information.” The same could be said for many run-of-the-mill news stories that follow the same predictable format, such as crime stories (type of crime, arrested person, date, time, address) game stories (scores, teams, other game stats) and meeting coverage (votes, agenda items).

Over time, that data would build on itself. Rather than running a weekly crime blotter for a year, an organization would have built a crime database with a year’s worth of data. In addition to meeting coverage of the city council, an organization would have a database of council members’ votes.

There are plenty of databases out there on news sites already – but few play off original data gathered by reporters, they’re mostly composed of government data ala EveryBlock.

Nobody is pitching these solutions as a true replacement to well-reported, thorough journalism.

“Updates from public data sources, meanwhile, are often devoid of context,” writes Joseph Tartakoff of PaidContent. “… because the entries are dependent on the automated information that the city provides, there are no details on what actually ended up happening at a certain location — and no way to sift through which ones are actually important.”

There’s a counterargument to that as well. Writes Matt Waite, news technologist at the St. Petersburg Times, “The context comes from the user through geography. The block is the context. The value you put into that context is based entirely on the fact that you live there.”

And that’s the bottom line for most “database journalism,” proponents say, that users can get from it what they want. For newspapers to adapt such solutions, though, will require investment in such “hacker journalists” as are behind EveryBlock.

Just for fun, here are some other ways EPIC 2015 came to fruition:

• Time tried customized magazine publication with its Mine magazine
• Thomson Reuters has developed technology, called Calais, to strip names, dates and other facts from stories
• Sites such as DailyMe and local site Pegasus News track users’ consumption and give personalized news recommendations from their habits

And a few other related links:

• Read about the New York Times’ team of “hacker journalists” in this New York Magazine story; see some of their innovations, from newspapers that are read to you as you drive to work here at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab
• Here’s a profile of Adrian Holovaty in American Journalism Review