Congratulations to Computational Journalists on the 2008 Election
By BradStenger | October 31, 2008
On October 18 the San Francisco Chronicle declared a winner in the 2008 Presidential Election.
No matter which presidential candidate is elected on Nov. 4, there’s already a clear winner in the 2008 campaign season - Nate Silver, 30, the founder of polling analysis Web site FiveThirtyEight.com. (Poll analysis sites put new spin on statistics)
While Nate Silver was out there raising the bar, dozens, possibly hundreds, of other journalistically minded programmers, database experts, spreadsheet wizards, interaction designers, and infographic artists have worked tirelessly to generate insight and find truth amidst tidal waves of data surging through the super-pressured news cycles. Media historians will, I hope, notice that this election was the one when substantial, sophisticated data analysis and presentation grabbed hold of the conversation and became established social currency.
It’s hard to gauge what the world will look like on November 5. When you do something that has never been done before, you’re changed. Beat political reporters, the ones authoring post-election stories, will try to capture that feeling. The computer jockeys who have created this new world of journalism will live it. And they will, I expect, take their heightened skills, insight, and prominence and go after the next frontier in computing and journalism. That’s because they can’t stop. They don’t get to, at least not for long. While the political beat cycles down and its reporters enjoy extended down time, the lower profile computer folks will head back to their laptops and workstations to continue the revolution they’ve started.
To the computational journalists who worked so hard during this year’s election, thank you.
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Lots of CnJ Questions. Lots of CnJ Answers.
By BradStenger | July 31, 2008
- Marc Frons, chief technology officer, digital operations for the New York Times, is currently answering the public’s questions the Ask The Times forum at nytimes.com. He’ll be taking questions between July 28-Aug. 1, 2008.
- Webmonkey.com posted a lengthy Q&A with Dan Jacobson from NPR and Derek Gottfrid from the New York Times about each of the news organizations’ APIs. The interview was by Brad Stenger, one of the organizers of the Journalism 3G conference. He has posted the even lengthier extended interview here at computational-journalism.com.
Topics: Automation, Content Management, Mashups, News Interfaces, Productivity | No Comments »
CnJ Activities
By BradStenger | July 19, 2008
- Folks attending OSCON at the Convention Center in Portland this coming week (July 21-25, 2008) should check out Derek Gottfrid’s Birds of a Feather session on APIs and the New York Times taking place Thu, 7/24, 7pm in Room D139/140. The session comes shortly after a presentation by NPR’s Dan Jacobson, NPR: API and Open Source, at 5:20 in D138. The meeting will also have ample technical discussion of Drupal, Ruby on Rails, and content managers and web development frameworks in every shape and size.
- At SIGGRAPH2008 in Los Angeles (goes on for the week, 8/11-15, at the Convention Center), Irfan Essa, will be running a half-day class on Computation and Journalism. It’s scheduled for Wednesday, August 13, starting at 1:30pm, with more details to come. A quick look at the SIGGRAPH Advance Program shows that we’re competing with a technical panel discussion on “Jiggly Fluids” at roughly the same time.
- And Minnesota Public Radio in collaboration with Info Viz researcher and soon-to-be Stanford professor, Jeff Heer, have launched the Minnesota Employment Explorer. It’s a platform for ongoing community discussion of the state’s economic ups & downs, directing attention to swings in different economic sectors for the 2000-2007 period. The visual presentation of public data makes it digestible for interested citizens, easy for them to consider, and then share their insights, in keeping with MPR’s Public Insight Network and their success with innovative news interfaces.
Topics: Automation, Info Viz, Mashups, News Interfaces | No Comments »
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 | No Comments »
Global Voices Online seeks Public Health Editor
By BradStenger | May 6, 2008
One of the smartest groups working in computational journalism is look for someone health-y.
The Public Health Editor will be responsible for writing weekly articles which cover the latest discussions and topics related to public health and human rights in the developing world …
More.
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