Comments on: Is it cancer? https://partnews.mit.edu/2016/03/09/is-it-cancer/ Treating newsgathering as an engineering problem... since 2012! Wed, 09 Mar 2016 19:08:58 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.2 By: Wendi https://partnews.mit.edu/2016/03/09/is-it-cancer/#comment-151131 Wed, 09 Mar 2016 19:08:58 +0000 http://partnews.brownbag.me/?p=8162#comment-151131 This is interesting, but I don’t know what the story itself is. (Or maybe you didn’t intend this to be a story, in which case disregard what’s below.)

How you got the data is impressive to non-tech folks, but if the reader can’t tell WHAT the point is, does the technical scraping process matter?

Perhaps the “how I did this” could be a footnote to a short, succinct statements that a general audience could understand. Journalists usually write for a general audience but I’d argue that your average reader wouldn’t be able to tell you what those charts say.

Maybe the headline could have been: Nope, not all WebMD roads lead to cancer. (I’m not sure that’s what the headline would be, but that’s just to give you an idea.)

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