Last night marked the second monthly meetup of the Boston chapter of Hacks/Hackers, a coalition of modern news reporters and technologists that began in the San Francisco Bay area, and spread quickly to New York City and Boston. Some 75 local journalists, developers and people simply interested in the future of news turned up at Microsoft N.E.R.D. in Cambridge to see this month’s technology demos.
“Everyone realizes that the future of news is changing very dramatically,” said Matt Carroll, a specialist in computer-assisted reporting for The Boston Globe. He spearheads the Boston chapter of Hacks/Hackers. “What you have on one end of the spectrum are journalists who want to get involved in the new media and digital and on the other side you have technologists who are interested in media. Hopefully, this is going to be a sweet spot where they can both learn from each other. Each side is sort of teaching the other.”
Gardner-Smith presents Pinyadda
The first demo featured Austin Gardner-Smith, a scribe at Bostinno and the Product Lead at BostInnovation’s parent property Pinyadda. Gardner-Smith ran the audience through the personalized social news platform he and the team at Pinyadda are creating. It provides the easiest way to follow the news from the people, sites and topics in the system.
“Personally, I’m really interested in the complements of journalism and technology. My dad was a journalist for a long time, and I always fancied myself a writer and graduated from school with an English major, even though I’ve found myself coding despite my best intentions. All of this is very close to my heart.”
Gardner-Smith explained that the biggest problems facing the future of news involve the loss of ownership over distribution for publishers and a proliferation of low quality content for readers. Publications simply cannot control the flow of their information in order to monetize effectively, and readers have no choice but to sift through tons of bad writing and reporting to find the content that matters to them.
“Newspapers used to have a monopoly on distribution that was totally vertical. A newspaper published a piece of content, it came down the funnel through trucks and deliverers and ended up on your doorstep or at a news stand,” he said. “Now, because of the web, we have a horizontal distribution structure. Content is being distributed peer-to-peer. This distribution is much more horizontal.”
Pinyadda hope to change all that through their platform, which lets users rely on other like-minded “mavens” and “ambassadors” to sift through the junk and share the best news the Internet has to offer in real time. Similarly, Pinyadda is re-structuring the mass of content pushed out to the Internet each day into one massive platform of distribution for publishers.
Viégas and Wattenberg present Time Flow
After the audience had a look at the social distribution system Pinyadda has created, Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, the Co-Founders of Flowing Media, took the mic to demo their new open source project for displaying large data sets on a time line, called Time Flow. Former contributors to the IBM Many Eyes project, Viégas and Wattenberg started Time Flow as a summer project this year in hopes of making the large amount of information investigative journalists often have to sift through more manageable.
“We are working with a woman named Sarah Cohen who used to be at The Washington Post. She is now a professor at Duke University,” said Wattenberg. “She engaged us to do an interesting visualization project. She is looking at time lines as an essential tool of reporting practice. If you look at the software that’s out there right now for looking at time-based data, there’s nothing that really meets reporters’ needs.”
Viégas and Wattenberg, both of whom have just accepted positions at Google, demonstrated how Time Flow can take easily-imported data sets for things like what President Obama did during his first hundred days in office or recent political contributions by lobbyists, which would both be very difficult for reporters to parse through by hand, and make them into visually revealing displays. Using Time Flow, these data sets can be easily searched, sorted and segmented.
“We’re working on making this (able to create image files), but if you want an interactive version you can share with readers, right now, that doesn’t exist. We’re hoping to get there,” said Viégas. “Part of the reason there’s not a very direct path from this tool to a presentation tool, is because this tool was completely conceived from the point of view of scaling. We want journalists to be able to deal with tens of thousands of data points and probably when (they) are ready to share their findings, (they) might not want to share all of that data. There’s a question about how journalists will want to curate and share the data.”
Time Flow operates on a user’s desktop, making it extremely secure since for journalists since they will be able to access the data directly from their own computers. The creators hope to launch it to the public within the next few weeks, and since its open source, Viégas and Wattenberg are hoping others will chip in to make it even more useful and impressive than it already is.
Hacks/Hackers Boston are currently looking for more presenters like these to help further dialogues between journalists and developers.
“We’re looking for main speakers — obviously people who are sort of well known in the field who can get more people to show up, and we’re also looking for small startups,” said Carroll. “If there are people interested in speaking before this group, as long as it’s a media-related company, just give me a call or send me an Email.”
What do you think about the future of news? Where is it going and what can be done to monetize it? What kinds of tools (and data sets) should journalists have access to in the future? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below.
Tags: Company News, Edu, Flowing Media, Google, Hacks/Hackers, IBM, pinyadda, Time Flow
