Innovation
Does the idea of talking to a news bot bother you? That is interesting. Please continue
The first chatbot was born in 1966. Eliza, as her creator named her, mimicked a psycho-therapist. You can still chat with Eliza, like I did. Eliza was a proof of concept: an experiment designed to explore the potential of conversational interfaces. Now, 50 years on, chatbots are starting to crack into the mainstream — at … Continued
RJI Fellow expands work on mobile news app for smaller news organizations
Push notifications from The New York Times, the Guardian, BuzzFeed and The Washington Post alert us every day to scandal, horror, scientific achievement and grief. However, this capability lies mainly in the realm of large news organizations. Without a 24-hour news desk, smaller news outlets — especially weeklies and investigative centers — struggle to remind users … Continued
RiskMiner: A test case for information access and revenue streams
First in a series introducing our 2017-2018 RJI Fellows and their projects.
Journalism, the intelligence community and technology
Editor’s note: The author, who spent a year as an RJI Fellow exploring ways to report and create news stories using databases, has recently received funding to develop intelligence applications of his Structured Stories journalism database. The funding is being provided by the U.S. federal government’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program.
Media Innovation Summit raises challenges, solutions for student innovators
Student founders of color face unique challenges to creating sustainable ventures in the media innovation space. These include advertiser biases, lack of technological development support and plain old-fashioned racism. Top innovators of color in media entrepreneurship — from broadcast media and education to online and hyperlocal enterprises — came together April 22 to advance solutions … Continued
Top 5 best newsletter pop-ups
Seventh in a series to help newsrooms curate effective newsletters.
The end of the beginning: Viar and virtual reality may change the order in which a story is told
While the amazing visual impact of 360-degree virtual reality is a hot topic in the journalism world, a less obvious aspect of VR could change the very nature of storytelling. From city council reports to fairy tales, we tell the story in a linear fashion. Although we may vary the elements within the story, the … Continued
How do you connect disconnected people to the internet and digital news? There’ll be an app for that
My cousin lives in Cuba. He is one of the lucky 250,000 Cubans (out of 11.2 million) who connects to the internet every day. To connect, he first purchases an access card from ETECSA, the state-owned telecommunication company, at 2 CUC per hour of internet (10 percent of the average salary for a Cuban citizen). … Continued
InkaBinka: The news startup that’s actually a technology company
Dutch graduate students visited four U.S. journalism startups between December 2015 and February 2016 to observe how these entrepreneurs “make it work” and, in the process, redefine what it means to be a journalist. Their work is part of Beyond Journalism, a study of entrepreneurial journalism by 2015-2016 RJI Fellows Tamara Witschge and Mark Deuze, both journalism professors in the Netherlands.
Missouri School of Journalism reporters put virtual reality into deadline news
Mizzou VR Journalism hit a benchmark recently by publishing a 360-degree illustrated news feature on normal online newspaper deadline. In an Oct. 26 article in the Columbia Missourian, Emily Shepherd wrote about a Harry Potter-themed astronomy lesson that night at the University of Missouri’s Laws Observatory. Stephanie Miller provided normal photographic coverage, but Claudia Chong and … Continued