jtm2008

AUDIO: Journalism workflow -- automation, productivity

Kristian Hammond, co-director of the Northwestern University computer-science deparment, moderates a panel on how to manage newsroom workflow. Panelists were Albert Hauptmann, systems scientist at Carnegie Mellon University; Solana Larsen, co-managing editor of GlobalVoicesOnline.org; Carol Minton Moore, a one-time fourth-grade teacher and spokesman for the National Science Digital Library; and Rob Lamb, customer and partner development director at Clickability.com.

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Open source, open APIs touted as news tools

Open source, open "APIs" and the open scraping of new resources to create a custom "TV newscast" were among topics covered on Saturday at the Georgia Tech Symposium on Computation and Journalism.

Jacob Kaplan-Moss, lead developer at the Lawrence [Kan.] Journal World, made a plea for news organizations to use so-called "open-source" software for their backshop operations. He said this empowers creative web and database development by reporters and technologists and makes innovation occur faster. Kaplan-Moss is one of the key developers of the programming interface Django. He also cited Python, Drupal, Joomla and Ruby on Rails among other open-source programming languages or interfaces that may be useful to news organizations.

"In my idea future, this open-source future, there is no difference between writing stories and writing code. One is in English, one is in Python," said Kaplan-Moss, adding: "In the last couple of years this stuff has gotten a lot easier and more accessible to journalists, and if it isn't let me know about it and we'll fix it." Kaplan-Moss said news-organization information-technology executives often resist open-source and outsource software implementations.

Kristian Hammond, of the computer-science department at Northwestern University, offered a demonstration of NewsAtSeven.com, a website which allows a computer user to customize for personal viewing a TV-style newscast, complete with avatars speaking the news. NewsAtSeven uses information scraped from sources like Yahoo News and WikiPedia, and various video-news sources. Hammond's team has created a Facebook application which allows a Facebook user to push a personally-created video into the NewsAtSeven service, where Facebook friends can embed it in their own newscast. Hammond said this raised the possibility of consumer syndication of user-generated news. When a user creates a virtual custom newscast, the URL for the cached newscast can be sent to friends.

All of the information pulled into NewsAtSeven is gathered using APIs, or application programming interfaces, available from the source websites, said Hammond.  One challenge NewsatSeven raises, said Hammon: What happens when a consumer pulls a news account from a source such as CNN's iReporter, which is video supplied by non-professional journalists. "You end up with a broadcast news show that no professional reporter was ever involved in," said Hammond. "It's an interesting thing to think about." In response to a question, Hammond said NewsAtSeven developers have not focused on copyright issues associated with scraping news from other websites without specific approval. He said they were still a research-oriented activity, subject to "fair use" copyright exemptions. He said most of the clips they pull are short.

John Brothers, CTO of the Sunlight Foundation, briefed the audience on the use of APIs to access government information on such things as legislative "earmarks", federal contracts, campaign finance records and legislation. He demonstrated Sunlight's offering a single line of Javascript code which allows websites to embed "popups" of politician mini-profiles as a link within text. Brothers demonstrated a partnership with MinnPost.com, in which MinnPost links photos of the Minnesota congressional delegation to detailed contributor and political information served up from Sunlight based on extensive mashing of API-obtained public data. "This is what we feel is one of the most powerful examples of using an APi to further the cause of demoracy and understand what's going on in our congress and the world," said Brothers.

Help code to support journalism, democracy, technologists urged

Creating technologies that will support news gathering and give people information they need to support democracy and free markets were offered as the key challenges for technologists on Saturday by leading journalists who spoke at a Georgia Institute of Technology symposium.

"It needs to be a focus of the news industry -- how are we going to produce enough money from the viewing habits of people today online to cover the cost of people to go out and gather news," said Neil Budde, former editor-in-chief at Yahoo! News.

In the last 25 years, there are 3.5 billion people worldwide new to the democratic system of free-market economies, observed Wally Dean, online/broadcast director at the Committee of Concerned Journalists. "Will the new technoologies that you are creating give them the information that they need to be free and to govern themselves?" One promising sign, says Dean: "Young people clearly are getting very involved in things and they are not getting information from the traditional places."

Saturday's third session was entitled, "News X Roadmaps," with panelists Budde, Dean, Jacob Kaplan-Moss, lead developer for th e Lawrence Journal-World; and Ramesh Jain, information and computer science professor at the University of California-Irvine.

Budde talked about the environment for change presented by the internet starting from his early work in 1995 at the Wall Street Journal's website. The short-term implications on the future of traditional media were vastly overestimated, he said. He said to look for long-term implications. "So much of the talk about what's happening to news and media is focused on the villain of the Internet," said Budde. But he says the actual villain is really represented by the remote control -- the idea of expanded consumer choice. The biggest factor affecting the future of journalism, he said, is the business model: "What is going to support journalism and news in the future?"   Traditional media produced a package called a newspaper, said Budde, and readers and advertisers purchased one, mass-market product. "In the new model, people are picking bits of information," he said. "And in many cases they are seeing perhaps one ad connected to a particular story." News usage can be so precisely measured that Budde says he jokes that he could have done a profit/loss statement on each reporter's work in terms of how many people read it online.

Budde said this perfect measurability poses problems for the news indsutry, making it harder for editors to justify investigative reporting and explanatory forms of journalism. "It is going to be a lot more challenging for editors to justify those when everything gets measured and tracked," said Budde.  The perfect measurability and trackability allows advertisers to reach the right person with the right message at the right time, says Budde. And that should be the same thing editors want to be able to provide the best experience to users.

CCJ's Walter Dean desribed how WashingtonPost.com's technology creating automatic hyperlinks within stories erroneously made links to the wrong "James Stewart" in a story about the late actor. In investigating the error, WashingtonPost.com's Editor James Brady observed the online news site has found web users are more tolerant of errors than earlier news consumers and that creating hyperlinks -- even some in error -- was bringing lots of traffic to WashingtonPost.com. "How can a discipline of verification be layed over this vast amount of information?" asks Dean. "Do people need more information or more analysis? We need to move from being aggregators of 'stuff' to sensemakers."

About 75 percent of people who go to major news organizations go past the front page and go directly into a story. "And that suggests that first they are experts," says Dean. "So we need to be able to deliver to them a deep understanding with a high level of expertise . . . we need to really worry about the business models that support not just the supply of information, but business models that support sensemaking," says Dean.

Dean identified two challenges for journalists and technologists -- how to finance sensemaking, and how to help citizens to critically assess and create the news. Dean says 50 percent of U.S. newspaper readership is now online, but only 6% of print advertising revenue has followed the readers online. "The business model for that sense making is being significantly eroded," says Dean. "So how are we going to create a business model, if you see value in the sense-making world, that will allow that to continue?"

Dean added: "If the average person is becoming their own editor, how are we going to teach them the discipline of verification to understand what to believe, to figure out what they should think about it, and what criteria the should use to think about how to pass it on . . . how are people going to make decisions about what to believe and what to pass along to other people?" Citizens are going from being a spectator to a creator of news, said Dean. He asked the technologists: "What can you create that will help do that?"

 

A plea for journalists to understand technologists

Northwestern University professor Rich Gordon opened Saturday's session of a computational journalism summit at Georgia Tech with a plea for journalists to understand that the job of the technologist involves creativity and the job of the journalist increasingly involves challenging technology.  Gordon moderated a panel, "Advances in News Gathering," at a Symposium on Computation and Journalism in Atlanta.  "We've been doing computational journalism, if that's the term, for 20 years and yet this is the first time, that I know of where we've gotten a couple of hundred people from the worlds of journalism and technology together in one place to figure out where have some common ground." Gordon, who teaches at the Medill School of Journalism, added: "I would like to posit that many of us in the journalism field don't appreciate that computer science is a creative discipline and think that computer scientists, progammers are people who should do our bidding to build things we want. And I think maybe on the other side, on the computer science side, maybe  there isn't enough respect for the intellectual rigor that a good journalist goes through to do their job and an appreciation of the intellectual and creative challenges of doing htat job well. And I'd like to see us close that gap." With Gordon on the panel were Nic Fulton, chief scientist at Reuters Media; Paul Ferguson, supervising editor, international news, at CNN;  and Andrew Haeg, senior producer at American Public media's Center for Innovation in Journalism.

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Ferguson described the advances CNN has made in using mobile satellite technology to set up within eight minutes the capability to broadcast live television from anywhere in the world -- a package which costs many thousands of dollars, but now weighs only 65 pounds.  Fulton described Reuters experiments with technology partner Nokia to use a mobile camera phone for instant, low-resolution, on-the-street video interviews. In addition, he said Reuters is now using computers to electronically "read" news releases and write headlines and lead paragraphs, which are then briefly checked by an editor for accuracy before being transmitted globally.  "Now, we're beginning to have machines reading news and turning it into information that triggers trades," says Fulton. From Fulton's point of view, there is no lack of information in the Internet age, but there is a lack of analysis.  He said he hopes journalist and technologists will find ways to enable the public to read things such as congressional reports and efficiently extract and submit the news they contain.

Haeg listed three questions which challenge technologists working on journalism solutions: (1) What tools can we use to better spot patterns and emergent issue? (2) What's the most effiicnet way to disseminate all of the information and insights we're receiving? (3) How can we measure trust and confidence?

LINK: The 21st Century Editors at Georgia Tech -- more tech needs

On Friday afternoon, there was a panel on the "21st Century Editor in Chief." The talk aw part of the Symposium on Computation and Journalism at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. Moderator is Gary Kebbel, program director of the Knight Foundation in charge of the Knight News Challenge. On the panel are Shawn MacIntosh, director of culture and change at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Mitch Gelman, senior vp and executive producer of CNN.com and Christopher Barr, senior editorial director at Yahoo! and former founding editor in chif of CNet Networks.

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1 hour, 17 minutes, 36 seconds /  File Size: 37.25 MB

Kebbel describes the Knight Brothers News Challenge, a $25-million initiative of the Knight Foundation to support innovation in news and journalism which serves real local communities. He said all the definitions of news, audience and distribution are no longer certain.

Chris Barr talks about the "load of growth of traffic from handhelds." He says people seem comfortable with context-based advertising to enhance the user experience, but for some people "alarm bells go off" on privacy and other issues when behavioral targetting serves up different content to different users.  Barr provided his list of the "what's next" things which will influence journalism, including the next-general Internet Protocol, huge increases in bandwidth to homes, faster microprocessors, artificial intelligence, robs and nanotechnology. 

Then Barr offers a list of the things he hopes technologists will invent to help news and journalism, including: Self-identifying content, easier-to-use tools to publish to multiple distribution outlets, easier user-generated content, persistent real-time feeds (including video and audio), ubiquitous personalization, and massive localization.

Shawn MacIntosh, of the AJC, asked for more tools to understand audiences -- digital as well as print. What do print readers want to have as part of their experience, she asks?  And how can the serendipity of the newspaper page-turning experience be replicated on the web. "I'm not worried about the newspaper business. I couldn't be more excited about the demands for news . . . I think the challenges are going to require partnerships between journalists and technologists."

The editor-in-chief today is more a student and listener than anything else today, says Gelman, who is CNN.COM's lead editorial person. He talked about CNN's newest initiative, in beta, something called "I Report," a place where consumers can upload their own videos. Some of the videos get pulled from the I Report site to the general CNN service. "The authenticity of these pieces is vetted before it makes it onto CNN News," he says. "It is not vetted before it appears on IReport.com." He says the 21st-century editor's job is about recognizing the value of the consumer's contribution. And recognizing that the newsroom is now a news organization. He says it requires the humility to deal with technologists.
   

Beta: AllVoices.com allows peole to build 'events' that enhance or create a news story

Sanjay Sood, chief architect of AllVoices.com presented today at a Georgia Tech conference in Atlanta.  AllVoices allow people to build "events" around a news story. Sood calls it "building scaffolding for enabling citizen journalism." The site features the ability to discover events, and create them. Once you've created an event, the system will create context around it, including related news, blogs, images and videos. "This really gives people an incentive to create news." Founded in April of 2007, allvoices was started by passionate people who believe that in order to solve the world's problems, we need to appreciate different perspectives in order to have serious discussions about current events and breaking news. They want to encourage people to communiate with one other, to comment on, question and rate content, rank user generated content and the like. The call this "unedited, real-community news." 

Sanjay Sood, chief architect /  AllVoices.com / 900 Cherry Avenue, Suite 300 / San Bruno, CA 94066, USA / Phone: +1-650-794-2770 /http://www.allvoices.com/team

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.