Why the information industry needs to start developing *editorial algorithms* — a 10 point thread:

1. Humans are producing more information right now than we did at any point in history. We’re up to our eyeballs in data — data from the web, from sensors, from mobile devices and satellites, all growing exponentially.

2. The amount of data created over the next three years will be more than the data created over the past three decades. In the next five years, these technologies will produce more than three times the information that they did in the previous five.

3. What does this flood of data mean for the people whose job it is to make information accessible? How can we leverage emerging practices of journalism to derive business intelligence to inform decision making?

4. The ever-rising sea of data presents both a dramatic challenge and, up to this point, largely untapped opportunity for the information industry!

5. The field’s long-standing, mostly rigid methods do not have the capacity to interpret or contextualize the enormous amount of data our society is poised to produce. We need faster and more sophisticated information gathering if we don’t want to drown in big data.

6. In fact, determining what is deemed “newsworthy” will evolve into a process focused on finding and analyzing statistical outliers with clarity, while articulating meaning by providing the human context behind the data.

7. The concept of “drowning in data” sounds abstract, but there are real stakes involved in ensuring that the methods of journalism adapt to the reality of today’s information landscape.

8. In the next decade, society will face extraordinary challenges — from the increasing probability of global pandemics to crumbling infrastructure and the effects of climate change.

9. The disruptions to come call for an urgent reassessment of how information is sourced because good information plays a vital role in creating a shared reality which in turn enables individuals, govs and orgs to work towards solutions from a place of shared “ground truth.”

10. To meet the demands of the next decade, we must move towards a new type of journalism that is more scientific + analytical, a journalism that contextualizes data by continuously tracking sources and by processing and vetting it in real-time. This is computational journalism.