MPR's Skoler suggests the ways journalists need help from technologists

More than 200 journalists, engineers and others are assessing the relationship between computing power and journalism in Atlanta. They're at the George Institute of Technology for "A Symposium on Computation and Journalism."

An expert at bringing citizens into the news-gathering process offered suggestions during an opening keynote. Michael Skoler of Minnesota Public Radio said technologists can help journalist by advancing work on (1) filtering (2) fact-based social networking tools (3) advancing authentication networks that assure both trust and confidentiality and (4) develop games which assist public-data analysis.

Earlier, the key technologist behind Google News described the service's operating principles and the nature of its relationship with journalism. Krishna Bharat, a George Tech Ph.D., said the overall result of Google news is to "make the process ofunderstanding news intellectual" with many perspectives represented.

Bharat says Google doesn't want to own content, but wants to help people find it. "We wish to remain unaffiliated," he said. "we value breadth and diversity. We believe in fair and unbiased ranking." Finally, he said: "We don't want humans in the loop, we want machines doing it."

Answering a question from a daily newspaper editor, Christopher Peck, of the Memphis Commercial Appeal, he said Google "wants to be part of the solution" to help news websites make money on their content and support journalism.