I agree. You can still have a masterpiece newspaper article without metadata dripping all over it, but no amount of metadata is going to fix shoddy journalism.

I agree. You can still have a masterpiece newspaper article without metadata dripping all over it, but no amount of metadata is going to fix shoddy journalism. Fortunately, the metadata stuff isn't rocket science. What is rocket science, however, is computational journalism. I think the NYT is onto something here. What happens when you pump up great journalists with the ability to mine data, create visualizations, and explore complex relationships that are intractable without computational assistance?