http://www.computational-journalism.com/symposium/2008/01/23/news-x-roadmaps/

Neil Budde
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we always over-estimate the short term impact and underestimate the long-term.

Internet publishing a good example - the hockey stick curve.

What is going to support journalism and news in the future? We're looking at short term implications. We need to look at the long term ones too.

As you look at the implications - how are we going to produce enough money from the viewing habits of people online to cover the costs of people gathering the news?

We have so much more analytics that we are enabling the editors to find that the expensive, long-term project doesn't have the readers to justify the costs. This is a real threat. We can do profit and loss statements on every single reporter, meausre how much ad revenue each reporter is bringing in. It is going to be harder and harder to have the editors capable of justifying expensive projects in the face of metrics that show the popularity.

However, I think we'll find models that will help us. The Internet is enabling us to reach more and more users.

Another challenge is that too often, on average, the user comes once or twice a month and reads only 5 stories. However, the core 10% of users may come everyday and read lots of news. We shouldn't be tempted to the number of users without being sure to focus on the dedicated audiences that are the equivalent of the newspaper readership.

The combination of personalisation with social media forms is finding stories that are buried.

Paid content: "I think there are still areas where it is possible to get people to pay ... the direction where they (WSJ) are going to reach a large audience, but keeping some areas paid".

Wally Dean
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Do not confuse communication with news, and do not confuse news and information with journalism.

The algorithms that you talk about can shift a lot of sand, connect us as geographic, and cover communities of interest, but the formulas you create to not necessarily check facts ir create wisdom.

How can a discipline of verification be layered over the enormous amount of information that can be processed

What do people want. We need to move from being stuff miners, aggregators, shifters and become sense-makers.

Can we find another business model to allow that sensemaking to continue, that layer all the information, and that's especially important, and people often say we're the gatekeepers, we charge to open and close the gate to control the flow of info, but you've torn down the fence and we're still trying to charge for opening and closing the gate.

How are people going to make decisions about what to believe, and what to pass onto other people.

In the presidential campaign you can get data from everywhere, but people say they go into the voting booth and vote based on character. What can we do to better deliver their data.

Local television invented the weather services we see now. They bought dopplar radars and sent their anchors to learn about meteorology, and then they became the forecasters. It's made them millions of dollars...

Jacob Kaplan-Moss
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Django - the web framework for perfectionists with deadlines

Opening up Newspapers

Moved from California to Kansas - and then released djangoproject.com

Why is a small newspaper in Kansas releasing Open Source software?

First of all, let's discuss open-source. Not 'free'. Latin has Gratis and Libre, but English doesn't.

Ellington CMS

Imagine the open-source newspaper

Amy is a sys admin, she works for a newspaper and never gets to take vacation. She dreams of working for Amazon web services, S3 and EC2

Brian is a programmer, most of the day he spends cursing his vendors. He spends too much time on the phone calling the vendors, Oracle, Microsoft, BEA. He dreams of working at Google, where he's paid to work on platforms that work, and it's cool shit...

"Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." - Linus's Law (perhaps not said by him)

Chris does something about paperwork. He's a middle manager. I wouldn't keep him.

Darla is a reporter. A very good one. She's very interested in developing online features. But if she has a cool idea, she calls Chris, who asks Brian, who talks to the vendor who... If you're lucky she'll learn HTML and maybe MyMaps, Dabble, etc., but right now the story would take 6 months to write...

Is there a difference in writing stories or writing code?

"Put your money on the screen" - Ridley Scott - if you've got a low budget and you do something expensive, really, really use it...

jacob@jacobian.org
http://toys.jacobian.org/presentations/2008/journalism3g/

Ramesh Jain
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Events in Journalism - a company I was involved in, called Virage, gave me a view into journalism.

Journalism is a very old profession. It's about "Sharing Experiences: Spacial and Temporal"

In news, although technology changed, the fundamental nature remained broadcast, however, we're changing not to a personalised media.

But the fastest growing device is mobile phone, and their users are big consumers of news.

Computational Journalism:

* Finding an important event
* Collecting experiential data about event
* Knowing history of the event
* Projecting effects of this event
* Multimedia storytelling about the event using post- and pre- information of the event

Philosophers argue whether events or objects are primary.

Objects great for static situations. Events about dynamic events.

Events: what, when, where, who - why and how

Facets: informational, experiential, structural, temporal, causal, ...

We are at the gopher stage in a google world.

Consider an web of nodes, where each node is an event. This node has the facets.

We have an almost complete EventWeb - event representation, linking and call web2.0 tools.
This is a Walled Garden...
Plans to release in April