Amid the general clamor that newspapers and old Media are dead/not dead, it’s the more shadowy corners of the Web where you’ll find the most interesting discussions taking place — where people who are actually invested in creating the future (not just yapping about it) are working out the ideas that will inform tomorrow’s media.

One of the more important people you’ve never heard of is Adrian Holovaty. He’s a programmer/journalist and future generations might know him as one of the guys who saved the newspaper industry. Holovaty currently works at washingtonpost.com as editor of editorial innovations. He is lead developer Django, an open-source programming framework that makes Web development faster and more flexible.

What Holovaty is trying to do is explode the old notions of what newspapers should be. His recent post, A fundamental way newspaper sites need to change, makes his point very clear: “Newspapers need to stop the story-centric worldview.”

In the age of the Web, of vast stores of digital information, it’s certainly still important that journalists gather and distill facts to present a story — but what Holovaty points out is that “the story” is not the natural end point of the journalist’s work or the newspaper’s value anymore.

“For example, say a newspaper has written a story about a local fire. Being able to read that story on a cell phone is fine and dandy. Hooray, technology! But what I really want to be able to do is explore the raw facts of that story, one by one, with layers of attribution, and an infrastructure for comparing the details of the fire — date, time, place, victims, fire station number, distance from fire department, names and years experience of firemen on the scene, time it took for firemen to arrive — with the details of previous fires. And subsequent fires, whenever they happen.”

When the underlying data behind a story is presented, I as a reader am allowed to sift through that data to begin creating my own story. In the case of a local fire, I would probably want to check out statistics in my neighborhood. I might even end up commenting on the original story, or writing a post on another site, referencing my more specific findings.

Similarly, this data could be invaluable to reporters, allowing them to easily make valuable connections using historical data that informs their future stories.

“First, the question of “How is this journalism?” is academic. Journalists should have less of a concern of what is and isn’t “journalism,” and more of a concern for important, focused information that is useful to people’s lives and helps them understand the world. A newspaper ought to be that: a fair look at current, important information for a readership.

Second, it’s important to note I’m not making an all-or-nothing proposition; I’m not saying newspapers should turn completely to vast collections of data, completely abandoning the format of a news article. News articles are great for telling stories, analyzing complex issues and all sorts of other things. An article — a “big blob of text” — is often the best way to explain concepts. The nuances of the English language do not map neatly to machine-manipulatable data sources. (This very entry, which you’re reading right now, is a prime example of something that could not be replaced with a database.) When I say “newspapers need to stop the story-centric worldview,” I don’t mean “newspapers need to abolish stories.” The two forms of information dissemination can coexist and complement each other.”

In a time where newspapers are struggling with profitability and the role that local coverage plays in their products, Holovaty’s ideas (as judged from some of the comments) seem fanciful when compared with the demands of “the bottom line” and return on investment.

But I think fanciful is exactly what they should be. What better way to describe a reinvention that has the potential to recapture our imaginations and interest?

Because it’s a reader exploring how a set of data points intersects with his or her home and neighorhood that bridges the gap between individual and community — revealing how interconnected we really are.

I think it will take a supreme leap of faith for journalists to marginalize their role as “master storytellers” and refocus their efforts as “story enablers,” librarians almost. But the payoff in giving us the tools to reveal our own stories in all that data could revitalize an entire industry.