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NY Times features (and hires for) Computational Journalism
By BradStenger | June 24, 2008
Google News is the subject of a 1500-word article in the NY Times’ Technology section, At Google, Slow Growth in News Site, by Miguel Helft. Journalism 3G keynote Krishna Bharat gets quoted near the end of the piece.
Last week, for instance, a cluster of articles on gay marriages in California included those from major national and California outlets, like The Los Angeles Times, The San Jose Mercury News and The New York Times. It also included an opinion piece from a radio news service in West Virginia that was critical of gay marriage.
“I don’t think it is a negative that they have this kind of diversity in the news,” said Danny Sullivan, a search expert and editor of the Web site Search Engine Land. “With the diversity can come weird stuff.”
Google said that juxtaposing various viewpoints is part of the appeal of Google News. “If you see opposing points of view battling it out, it makes you wake up and think,” said Krishna Bharat, the research scientist who created Google News. “That’s what makes people news junkies.”
The machinery that runs Google News is, when viewed positively, a solid success. The diversity of stories mentioned in the article equates with the sophistication of the algorithms being deployed. The information density for the word- and number-filled, single-page interface runs very high, no accident when it’s free of real estate-hogging video. And given that the design serves viewers mostly at one-page intervals, news.google.com still ranks Number 8 among all news sites.
The Times, however, presents a less rosy perspective on Google News, pointing out that other, higher-ranking news sites geared towards multi-page views and showcasing multimedia (like Yahoo! News, MSNBC, and nytimes.com) have grown much faster over the past few years.
It’s worth noting that the NY Times is currently hiring a range of journalistically-inclined software developers. Since June 15 the company has posted jobs on Monster.com for:
- Software Engineer-FEEDS
- Associate Technical Writer
- Interface Engineer
- Technical Project Manager
- Online News Designer
- Design Technologist
- Information Architect
- Software Developer-Content Management Systems
Topics: Automation, Content Management, Info Viz, News Interfaces, Productivity |