So is the future of data journalism really just an extension of this earlier, social scientifically oriented journalism?

In some ways, yes. A number of websites—Nate Silver's 538. com, the Upshot at the New York Times, ProPublica, and many others—are practicing a form of data journalism that Phil Meyer and the founders of NICAR would recognize.

There's a difference, though, between data journalism and other computer-based forms of journalism that's worth emphasizing. There is an even newer form of quantitative journalism—we might call it computational or structured journalism—that is different from the social scientific journalism we have discussed so far. In a nutshell, this kind of journalism focuses less on the social scientific analysis of data sets and more on generating a kind of data that can be easily aggregated and processed by a computer algorithm. Rather than applying social scientific analysis to data sets, this kind of journalism tries to create a large-scale journalistic database of people, events, locations, and other newsworthy incidents that can be combined and recombined in different ways. In other words, rather than writing a five- hundred-word story on a shooting in Washington DC, structured journalism would plug the relevant information about the shooting (the neighborhood where it took place, the date, gender and race of the victim, and so forth) into a database that could later be analyzed both by computer algorithms and working journalists. In some ways, the idea of journalists constructing a database sounds ridiculous: who would want to read such a thing, and who would want to spend their day doing it? But imagine such a database about homicides in Washington DC (such a thing actually exists, by the way, called Homicide Watch) that got built over a period of months or years and might be able to eventually tell us about the politics of gun control and crime in the nation's capital. In this and a growing number of similar cases, journalists produce not only stories but, in fact, also databases designed for use by any journalists, social scientists, or other individuals who might want to make use of them. This is the promise of structured journalism, and it's likely we're going to be seeing more of it in the future.