Tag Archives: sxsw

The Economist: Aggregation, curation, and the changing journalist’s toolkit

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A blog post by the Economist from the South by Southwest (SXSW) event in Texas takes a closer look at a much retweeted tweet: “@robinsloan The way to cover big news in 2011 is not “here’s what happened.” It’s “here’s how to follow the story” http://t.co/sMqGOuh”.

You might say that you don’t need to be a journalist to cobble together a list of links. But actually, given the huge proliferation of sources these days, you do. Being able to scan a vast range of material, determine what’s reliable, relevant and sufficiently objective, decide what will actually interest your particular readers and arrange it in a way that they can use are not trivial skills.

Full post on the Economist’s SXSW blog post at this link

A look at the Guardian Hacks SXSW event

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The Guardian played host to designers, developers and journalists at the weekend for its “Guardian Hacks SXSW” event. (The raw data reveals that there were 82 developers, 12 girls and 12 ‘full beards’, among other things.)

Guardian information architect Martin Belam takes a look at some of the day’s hacks on his blog:

The hack that appeared to draw the most gasps from the assembled journalists in the room, and consequently won, was Articlr, which was presented by Jason Grant. It was a back-end tool for easily monitoring social media and rival coverage of a story in real-time, and then simply dragging-and-dropping elements from external sites into a story package. With a bit of geo-location goodness thrown in. I fully expect the feature request to be on my Guardian desk by about 11am this morning…

Plus you can see full coverage from the Guardian at this link and related Twitter goings on using the #gsxsw hashtag.

ReadWriteWeb: Wikipedia as a breaking news source

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From the ‘process journalism’ session at the SXSW Interactive event in Texas comes a discussion about Wikipedia as a news source. ReadWriteWeb reports:

Just like other news aggregation services, Wikipedia takes many sources and puts them in to a central location, but with the added benefit of human curation instead of algorithmic collection.

“There’s no real-time reporting going on in Wikipedia, it’s real-time aggregation,” Pantages [Moka Pantages, WikiMedia communications officer] said.

So the very first level of information vetting, which happens at the reporting level, has already taken place by the time it reaches the site. Then the hundreds or thousands of editors continue to scrutinize the information, discussing edits and potential changes in the back channels. The news we read in our daily newspapers, on the other hand, is curated by only a small number of people. Surely, there is the question of qualification, but many of Wikipedia’s contributors and editors are, themselves, professionals.

Full post at this link…

Elise Hu: Future of context at SXSW

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Elise Hu has written a thorough round-up of the ‘Future of Context’ panel at the SXSW Interactive conference in Texas.

Some great thinkers in media are leading what I’ll call the ‘context movement’, a push toward giving audiences more satisfying, better understanding of the worlds in which they live instead of simply presenting ephemeral, episodic stories as journalists always have.

Panellists included:

Matt Thompson, NPR and formerly of the Knight Foundation; Jay Rosen, author of PressThink and professor at NYU; Tristan Harris, CEO/Founder of Apture.

Full post at this link…

(Hat-tip: Jay Rosen on Twitter)

Also see:

stevenberlinjohnson.com: The crucial ecosystem of technology news

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From a speech by Steven B. Johnson, co-founder of Outside.in, at the South by South West Festival:

“I think it’s much more instructive to anticipate the future of investigative journalism by looking at the past of technology journalism (…) It is the old-growth forest of the web. It is the sub-genre of news that has had the longest time to evolve.”

Full post at this link…