Over at The Scoop Derek Willis explains his personal decision to move from the Washington Post daily newspaper over to WashingtonPost.com where he will be the database editor.

That said, there have been several of my colleagues who, when informed of my plans, responded with a single query and often an uncomprehending look: “Why?” To many of them, the creation of the journalism is the most important work, one that somehow gets lessened the further away from the newsroom one goes.

Willis is a CARs (Computer Assisted-Reporting) expert. In his series of essays on the art of CAR reporting you can see his evolution of thought on how it can help save journalism, so it’s fitting that his most recent entry was “The Canvas for CAR — the Web is the canvas for CAR, better than any other platform we’ve come up with as an industry.”

From that essay: “Instead of relying on a paper’s database analysis alone, readers could actually search the data themselves.”

I don’t know what’s in store for WashingtonPost.com’s databases, but if we can expect to see more projects like the Congressional Voting Database, then I’d say things are in good hands. (Just an FYI: The Congressional Voting Database is always a top result when you Google different variations on “Congress voting records”).

CARs has plenty of room to grow. There are already examples of what is possible when you crowdsource your databases, but the practice is still not used enough or to its full potential.

Perhaps this is one of the areas an ambitious Willis can tackle as he moves over to WashingtonPost.com. “But it doesn’t make it any less urgent that we as an industry tackle this gap. It’s one of the things I hope to be able to do at WashingtonPost.com - be an example of how you can mix the newsroom and the Web site in a way that sustains and encourages both rather than takes from one to grow the other.”