maandag 29 juli 2019

JOURNALISM AS ALGORITHM


Automating the News. How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Media. By Nicholas Diakopoulos 

ISBN 9780674976986 ; Harvard University Press 2019


At the end of a training in standard data journalism, focusing on Excel, scraping and visualizing data a question came up how to integrate data skills in journalism education? Discussion ended in two opposed opinions. The first stated that is was cheap and easy to integrate data journalism skills in the standard curriculum as a kind of specialization. That is instead of TV, Radio, Magazines and Newspapers, an other choice for specialization was created high lighting wide range of data journalism skills. The opposition took a longer approach and defended the idea of creating a new curriculum that could be named computational journalism. Computer science and therefore coding like R would be an important element. Then, I was not convinced by the arguments of the second group and believed that borrowing elements of computer sciences for data journalism would be the right approach.
Now I am less convinced and believing that there is demand for a separate study as computational journalism. There are interesting developments in that direction. First there is the growing interest in the use of R at leading news media.

dinsdag 23 juli 2019

Future of Journalism: AI GIVES INSPIRATION


Dutch newspaper NRC-Handelsblad wrote an interesting story about new tools for journalists based on AI artificial Intelligence-https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2019/07/23/alstublieft-hier-uw-invalshoek-a3967882.
This article highlights a tool called Inject -https://injectproject.eu/, which can be installed as extension in Chrome browser, but Google docs as an other option. Inject is a kind of specialized search engine, which the author gives the opportunity to check news angles, quotes, causal relationships and graphs. "New tool INJECT aims to help journalists find inspiration for stories and be more productive"  writes UK journalism blog - https://www.journalism.co.uk/news/new-tool-inject-aims-to-help-journalists-find-inspiration-for-stories-and-be-more-productive/s2/a703665/ .
Although it is a demo version, but when keying 'data journalism' the result where a bit disappointing to say the least. Let's see how Inject improves over the coming months