The art of making sense of data — and it is truly an art — is a key element in building the future of journalism. Interactive presentations created from data can be personalized by the reader, giving a more engaging news experience. Data-based applications can also lead to new business models, through paid or subscription-based applications that give extra value to readers by providing a new dimension on news coverage.
Thanks to all who turned out at Google for our event on Wave and journalism. If you weren’t able to make it, the archived livestream of the event is embedded below (two videos). There’s lots of info there about the concepts behind Wave as well as demonstrations of typical workflows. “It took Twitter months to get the 1 verb of its product into the popular lexicon. Wave has a whole new vocabulary!
I’m excited to announce that we’re joining forces with some industry leaders working at the intersection of journalism and technology to help expand Hacks/Hackers into a wider community. Rich Gordon, associate professor and director of digital innovation at the Medill School of Journalism, and Aron Pilhofer, editor of Interactive News Technologies at The New York Times, will be helping to build Hacks/Hackers. We all felt this is the right idea at the right time, and look forward to bringing our different perspectives on the issue to help foster this community.
For the next Hacks/Hackers event, we’ll be heading to Google headquarters in Mountain View to talk about Wave and potential applications for journalism. I’ll be writing more about what people have done so far in a future post and are happy to hear about ways you think it could be useful. But for now, here’s the description for the event from our meetup site, and please go ahead and RSVP here.
The Pew Internet and American Life Project is out with their latest report on how Americans consume news. There are many highlights in there, so I’ll just mention a few that are direct quotes from the report’s summary. I would strongly recommend that you read the rest for yourself. The internet is now the third most popular news platform, behind local television news and national television news 50% [of Americans] say they read news in a local newspaper The majority of online news consumers (57%) say they routinely rely on just two to five websites for their news > 75% of online news consumers say they get news forwarded through email or posts on social networking sites and 52% say they share links to news with others via those means
Asking the right questions is critical in getting compelling answers from sources, as all reporters know. A problem with online comments is that they are often unfocused and off-topic given the open nature of many commenting systems. Asking the right questions is critical in getting compelling answers from sources, as all reporters know. Yahoo! researcher Yury Lifshits has built a tool called Interview2010 that aims to help get better answers from readers through a structured question and answer system.
Thanks to all of you who posted ideas for future events at the meetup site. I’d like to bring the conversation over here because meetup doesn’t allow commenting on ideas beyond simply “liking” them. So far, this suggestion has received the most interest: Forget “hack day” – Hackers need to learn to be Hacks – Shadow Hacks for a day! One of the ongoing tensions in this space is that it seems that the tools that Hackers are developing only solve a subset of problems that face journalism today.
[]1Things got a little heated at the Hacks/Hackers event on the Future of Personalized News. After founders Dan Olsen of yourversion and Ethan Gahng of lazyfeed talked about providing relevant stories to readers, some in the crowd pressed them about how to pay the creators who craft all that quality media that audiences want. But as Dan and Ethan pointed out, they aren’t making any money themselves and are still trying to figure out their business model.
Thanks to all who attended the Hacks/Hackers meetup on the Future of Personalized News! I’ll be writing more about the event in a separate post — things got a bit heated at times and there was some good debate about how to ensure quality content survives in the aggregation age. The archived livestream is below, and here’s a written summary on Google Buzz by Abe Epton of Google News. (thanks Abe!
Welcome to Hacks and Hackers, the online community for discussion around the real-life meetups of the same name.