Well, you have to remember two things. First, publishing (whether it's papers, broadcast, whatever) is a big lumbering business. There are entrenched interest

Well, you have to remember two things. First, publishing (whether it's papers, broadcast, whatever) is a big lumbering business. There are entrenched interests, people who fear or loathe technology, egos, and all of the other perils which modulate large scale human endeavors. There are people within the news world who have been working on computer assisted reporting, doing all sorts of cool stuff for decades now. What hasn't happened is a uniform and widescale adoption of all of these practices, because much of the workflows involved in the business are tied to their legacy business, and those legacy components are really difficult to shed for a pile of reasons. Ben may be talking about this stuff as a good idea, but it's not that nobody's been doing this stuff... it's that stuff like this isn't standard practice across the industry (yet). Also, please remember that Ben is talking about automating these processes. Reporters have been filing FOIA requests manually, and getting info from the government essentially for as long as there has been a government and foia laws. That's where part of the tepidness about technology comes from. The government isn't particularly friendly to efforts to stream line processes that get more information to reporters.