Tech journalist Fruhlinger, Thinknum to produce stories from data

Tech journalist Joshua Fruhlinger and fintech company Thinknum have launched Thinknum Media, which will produce stories using Thinknum’s data.

Christine Schmidt of Nieman Lab reports, “Fruhlinger leads the team of writers charged with taking the data and building ‘facts-only’ stories around it, which other news organizations could aggregate from or could prompt business-minded folks to buy into Thinknum’s database to monitor in the future.

“‘As a journalist who has been everywhere from Engadget to The Wall Street Journal to TMZ and seen all different sides of the reporting world, one thing I’ve learned is that facts and actual trends are some of the most fertile grounds for being able to tell a story,’ Fruhlinger told me. Or, as he put it in his intro post, ‘There is a universe of numbers out there, and I want to tell their stories.’

“Thinknum’s cofounders approached Fruhlinger about the media opportunity for their database, which is built by frequent crawls across the Internet in search of quantifiable data, such as the aforementioned Chipotle prices. The project has been in the works for over a year. Fruhlinger says he was drawn by the cold, hard numbers Thinknum has been stockpiling since its founding in 2013: ‘…pulling that data every six hours from all of Chipotle’s locations, parsing it into a database, and normalizing it into an interface that an investor has a subscription to,’ he explained for the burrito bowl example. ‘What’s proprietary here is that we’re collecting it on a regular basis and normalizing it.'”

Read more here.