As a journalist, I am trained as an absolutist in matters of open data. Public records should be just that, public, and as agents of transparency, news media outlets should help cast sunlight on those records. In that context, data is not good or bad, right or wrong; it is information that should be there for the asking, taking or publishing.

That was my initial reflex after The Journal News in Westchester County, N.Y., decided, in the aftermath of the Newtown, Conn., shootings, to publish a map with the names and addresses of people who had applied for handgun permits in two suburban counties. I followed a simple logic: the records were open, the public interest was high and journalism that blends both those things makes sense.

But on reflection, was it really journalism? Not so much. The accompanying article was about whether gun permits should be public, but the newspaper seemed to have all but decided that debate by publishing the map. More problematic was the closeness in time to the Newtown massacre, which served to cast suspicion and guilt in tendentious ways. By dropping the records into the maelstrom of a mass shooting, was The Journal News merely putting data-driven link bait out there?

Publishing is a discrete act, separate from whether something is public or not. Our job as journalists is to draw attention, to point at things, and what we choose to highlight is defined as news. And then it is our job to create context, talk to sources who bring insight and provide analysis. Given that, simply pointing out that something is public as the sole reason for republishing it is not a sufficient justification.

It is one thing to have a public database available that lets me look up whether the neighbor I am feuding with might have a gun permit. It is quite another to publish the names and addresses of all my neighbors who own guns. The decision lacked a rationale. It was what we in the business call “b matter” in search of a lead.

”My first reaction was, why are they doing this? What is the purpose?“ asked Leonard Downie Jr., the former executive editor of The Washington Post who now teaches at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. “You have to have a very high standard when you publish the addresses of people to begin with, even though those are public.”

(The editor of The Journal News declined any further comment, but the paper’s publisher and president told my colleague Christine Haughney that she supported the publishing of the data.)

But if a public need is not being met, a public appetite certainly is. Newspapers and various Web sites are full of real estate records, crime reports and marriage applications, all of them public, and all of them published with an understanding that we are nosy looky-loos.

Entire print and Web businesses are built on the publication of mug shots, which may be unseemly, but is perfectly legitimate and, speaking from personal experience, very compelling content.

In fact, in trendy journalistic circles, data is all the rage. The last presidential election seemed to be all about the data, with battles breaking out over polls and projections as much as the policy issues. Much of it is exciting and creates transparency, but data needs to be looked after and shaped in the same way that news articles are.

HomicideWatch.org, an independent database of murders in our nation’s capital, has just announced a partnership with The Chicago Sun-Times. This fall, the Knight Foundation, a source of financing for journalistic innovation, put its money behind big data, supporting applications that use data to enhance maps, open up elections and make census results more accessible.

Developers from The Washington Post and The New York Times are working on a crowd-sourced database called Open Elections, intended to create a standardized, linked set of data about elections.

Meanwhile, news organizations are using data to report, to decide which stories to pursue and to discern which areas of coverage are attracting readers. We write stories about Big Brother infiltrating our lives, but sometimes we serve as his wingman.

“Even big, open-sourced data companies like Google make it harder to find your address or your phone number to protect your privacy, to some extent,” said Nate Silver, who runs the FiveThirtyEight blog at The Times. “If something is public in theory, like this database was, it will become public in practice eventually. But I still think that you have to think about the implications and social costs of publication.”

Another thing about data is that it doesn’t necessarily lie, but it doesn’t always tell the truth either. The data on gun permit holders was extracted from various historical records. It was a list of people who had applied for permits at a certain point in time who might or might not have followed up and obtained a gun.

“The United States Census is out of date on April 2, the day after it comes out,” said Matt Waite, a media professor who specializes in data at the University of Nebraska. “People die, people are born, people go to prison, but we still treat it as truth when actually it’s only as true as humans can make it.”

Like a lot of journalism professionals who make a practice of mining data, Mr. Waite said he was concerned that the criticism against The Journal News — there have been threats against people who work there — could actually hurt the cause of free speech, if it prompted officials to close off public records.

It will surprise no one to learn that the response to data disclosure depends a great deal on whose information is being made public. Since its founding more than three years ago, The Texas Tribune, a Web site in Austin, has made a mission of gathering the salary information of every public employee in Texas. That database has been wildly popular.

“From the very first day we started, we have believed in acquiring, cleaning up and presenting public information people need or want to know,” said Evan Smith, chief executive and editor of the site.

He says he gets livid calls from public employees or their spouses several times a week, but that he always reminds them that the benefits of being a public employee come with the knowledge that their salary is a matter of public record. (Mr. Smith’s salary of $315,000 a year is public because “we believe that sunlight and transparency is a great disinfectant.”)

This week, the site — which, speaking of disclosure, has a content partnership with The Times — will use a combination of public statements and its own reporting to publish a data application that will let visitors examine the personal financial interests of the 181 members of the Texas Legislature.

Plenty of people will be peeking in, partly out of prurience, but also because they want to know whose interests are being voted up or down in the coming session.

That exercise sounds very different from plopping a list of possible gun owners on a Web site. We live at a time when data of all kinds can be unleashed with very little friction; part of the value of the news business comes from making sense of it all. When we push the button on something, we expect people to pay attention. We should make sure we are pushing that button for the right reason.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/14/business/media/guns-maps-and-disturbing-data.html?partner=rss&emc=rss