(iverson's) currentbuzz

In this future, both professional and amateur journalists will need to engage in more than just journalism, however. They must engage in new kinds of “news work” to serve their audiences. News work? Fact entrepreneurs? Credit goes to Columbia University doctoral student Chris Anderson for these new terms. They help us understand that journalism in the future must involve more than just gathering, validating and writing news stories. “News work” also requires such things sharing information, facilitating conversations, crowdsourcing, smart curation and aggregation, data mining and data visualizations, commissioning news games, gathering lists and resources and shouting out your good work to others.

via J-Lab | Entrepreneurship and the Future of News | Speeches.

The ability to collect, store, and manage data is increasing quickly, but our ability to understand it remains constant. In an attempt to gain better understanding of data, fields such as information visualization, data mining and graphic design are employed, each solving an isolated part of the specific problem, but failing in a broader sense: there are too many unsolved problems in the visualization of complex data. As a solution, this dissertation proposes that the individual fields be brought together as part of a singular process titled Computational Information Design.

via computational information design | ben fry.

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On a disaggregated Web, it seems, people and advertisers simply will not pay anything like the whole freight for investigative reporting. But Hamilton thinks advances in computing can alter the economic equation, supplementing and, in some cases, even substituting for the slow, expensive and eccentric humans required to produce in-depth journalism as we’ve known it.

via Media Articles | Deep Throat Meets Data Mining | Miller-McCune Online Magazine.

Economist James Hamilton is thinking abouthow we pay (or won’t pay) for investigative news. By using artificial intelligence to take drudgery out of the reporting, he will cut costs. However, his idea of the database journalism stories which can be put together by an algorithm may take the reporter out of the story, too.

This  squib from the story about Hamilton, “…In the not-too-distant future, Hamilton suggests, an algorithm could take information from EveryBlock and other database inputs and actually write articles personalized to your neighborhood and your interests, giving you, for example, a story about crime in your neighborhood this week and whether it has increased or decreased in relation to a month or a year ago,” could have been part of the classic video, EPIC 2014.

I believe that it will take reporters to pull together the connections the algorithms locate, and write them up to attract the interest of readers.

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