Top 1000 Public schools: Newsweek misses an opportunity
The magazine released its list of the Top 1,000 Public Schools in America. The complete list is available online.
But as I was scrolling through the list, I wondered “How many of these schools are in Georgia?” The answer? I don’t know because I stopped looking after the third page.
Now what could Newsweek have done to make this process easier? Answer: sortability and filtering.
We should all know by now that one of the differences between online and offline is the ability to interact and massage data to serve it to us the way we want it. And this list is the precise kind of data that lends itself to interactivity.
Give me the ability to filter results in my state. I want to know how many schools in my state (or better yet, my metropolitan area) are on the list. Order them in relation to each other and to the larger list (e.g., tell me that Lakeside H.S. is the top ranked school in Georgia and that it’s ranked #131 overall).
I want to know how many top-ranked schools have large numbers of students receiving subsidized lunches. If I know my school was included, I want to see where we rank. Let me sort the data alphabetically or by the percentage of students getting subsidized lunches.
Newsweek really missed an opportunity to turn a good data into an excellent online resource. Data uses much of its utility when you can’t manipulate it to extract useful information. Since this is an advantage of the medium, why not put it to full use?
Technorati: online journalism
It could be that they are using an enterprise CMS that makes such things (any sort of dynamic queries) exceedingly difficult. Or that the dataset is too unwiledy to properly present without incurring the overhead of searching, sorting, and paging logic that outweighs whatever benefit they could see themselves acquiring.
Or maybe they just suck…
I thought about that too. But I find it hard to believe that a major news organization doesn’t have some kind of outside-the-CMS publishing capability.
At one point, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution was using a RackSpace co-located server wth PHP and MySQL to run its MovableType blogs. There’s also a company that works with news companies to produce dynamic and rich media content like this. I can’t believe that Newsweek doesn’t have — or couldn’t quickly come up with — a similar solution.
I may be wrong, but it seems more like a lack of planning on Newsweek’s part.
Maybe, or perhaps its just a lack of vision. Failure of old media companies to understand the possibilities outside of their paradigm isn’t a rarity.
I can see the web / data guys just going nuts trying to explain this to management.