This year’s Global Editor’s Network (GEN) Summit, in Athens, Greece, had a big focus on the use of verification and automation. BBC News data scientist and PGCert Data Journalism student Alison Benjamin went along to see what was being said about artificial intelligence (AI), data and technology in the news industry. Here are her highlights…
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Image by kris krug
Last month The Cambodia Daily announced it was going HTTPS. In a guest post for OJB Joshua Wilwohl explains why they decided to go secure, and how they did it. (Disclosure: Joshua is a student of mine on the MA in Online Journalism by distance learning at Birmingham City University).
During the past year, The Cambodia Daily has witnessed an increase in government interest in monitoring the Internet.
This week, the newspaper revealed a government plan to inspect the network equipment, billing and data files of mobile phone operators and internet service providers.
Government officials argued this was to help with investigations into crime committed over Voice Over Internet Protocol, or VoIP.
But computer crime experts said the Government’s planned tactics could also be used to monitor people’s phone calls and Internet data. As one expert said: Continue reading
Is the Daily Mail less impartial than social media? That’s the takeaway from one of the charts (shown above) in Ofcom’s latest Communications Market Report.
The report asked website and app users to rate 7 news websites against 5 criteria. The Daily Mail comes out with the lowest proportion of respondents rating it highly for ‘impartiality and unbiased‘, ‘Offers range of opinions‘, and ‘Importance‘.
This is particularly surprising given that two of the other websites are social networks. 28% rated Facebook and Twitter highly on impartiality, compared to 26% for the Daily Mail. Continue reading
In a move which could have enormous implications for online publishers, Google announced that it is experimenting with encrypted search.
In plainer language, this means that – if someone is using the service – you won’t know what they have been searching for when they arrive at your website. This is great for privacy, but clearly scuppers any plans publishers might have to sell advertising based on what people are searching for when they arrive at the site – or, indeed, plans to adapt editorial based on what users are most interested in. Continue reading
Google News results for Johnston Press pages
Malcolm Coles asks a reasonable question of Johnston Press Digital Publishing: have they looked at their own pages in Google News? It seems a reliance on javascript is making their pages invisible to search engines.
The Google News Blog has posted on some truths and myths about its ranking systems (via Cowbite) – and this one caught my eye:
“Updating an article after posting it will create problems with Google News TRUE
Currently, the Google News crawler only visits each article URL once. If you make updates to the article after we’ve crawled it, they won’t be reflected on our site. We hope that soon we’ll have the ability to re-crawl your articles to make sure we have the latest version displayed on our site, but for now this is not the case.”
In other words, the commercial pressure here is not to update a single article, but to instead create new ones with the new information (there is already an imperative here in that this increases your page count stats).
I’m not sure if this is a bad thing (errors go uncorrected?) or good (twitter-style newsrivers?). Continue reading
Bas Timmers is Newsroom Editor at Dutch broadsheet de Volkskrant. This post is also available at http://www.bastimmers.nl/diginewsuk.php
“In the virtual world a year only lasts three months,” a manager once sighed. The innovations keep on coming very quickly indeed on the web, and a success story can turn into a tale of shattered dreams within months. Kazaa and ICQ were once extremely popular, for instance, but are now only marginal players on the web.
This high speed of innovation doesn’t mean that you cannot draw any lessons from the past. For example, Pablo J. Boczkowski was examining three online projects at American newspapers already in 1999 and 2000, but the conlusions he drew are still applicable. Continue reading
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