Journalists, academics and programmers came together to discuss ways to re-invent journalism at News Innovation London on Friday. With the recession, the discussion has a new sense of urgency.
Before the recession, newspapers found their readers shifting to the internet where it was more difficult for them to make money, but with the recession, news organisations have seen their revenues collapse as advertising disappears.
News organisations need new ideas, innovation and new ways to pay the bills, and they need these ideas fast. We've been talking about the future of news for years now, and while change came slowly, many journalists have found they have no future in the job they loved. Some news organisations have only a few years to adapt before their businesses fail.
The event was organised by the Media Standards Trust and the Web Science Research Initiative in cooperation with the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts.
Beyond the discussions about data-driven journalism and how the Guardian built its MPs expenses crowdsourcing tools, the event was the launch of a new data format developed by the Media Standards Trust and the Associated Press. By standardising and improving the way that news organisations format the information in their stories, Martin Moore with the Media Standards Trust hopes that it will make it easier for news organisations to improve searching of their stories and to unlock value in their archives.
The data format is based on the hAtom microformat. A microformat uses existing web tags to contain metadata, data that helps organise and make sense of information online. The news microformat includes a summary of the story, a dateline of where the story was writen, the author's name, any "news principles" adhered to by the organisation, usage rights and even who edited the story.
Moore said the news microformat would prevent incidents like the re-reporting of a six year old story about United Airlines declaring bankruptcy last year. Before the error was discovered, United Airlines parent company lost $1bn in value on the stock market, forcing trading to be halted.
"Had it been marked up, had it had a simple amount of metadata, all of this could be prevented," Moore said, adding, "That's the downside, but the upside is huge. But it's largely unfulfilled."
They have launched a developmental search engine that takes advantage of the new microformat. Currently, the search engine only indexes content from OpenDemocracy.org.
One feature of the search engine is that it can output results in the web data format JSON, which developer Mark Ng said would allow news organisations features similar to the Guardian's Open Platform, a set of web feeds and APIs that allow developers to build applications easily with Guardian content.
The microformat is an open-source, non-profit venture, Moore said, and they hope to add plug-ins for open-source content management systems like blogging platform WordPress and community publishing platform Drupal.
The Associated Press also announced a private beta programme of an API based on the microformat.
A member of the audience asked about the "news principles" element of the microformat.
Ng said, "If a news organisations link to principles, perhaps they will think about them more."
More information is available at ValueAddedNews.org.
Ideas about the future of news
Adam Tinworth, the blogs editor at Reed Business Information, blogged several of the sessions, including:
• New data driven projects after the MPs expenses
• Martin Belam's talk about new ways to tell stories and new ways to manage them online - content management systems of small pieces loosely joined
• Problems with user content
• A discussion I led about new news business models
I asked several of the people at the event about their ideas about the future of news and journalism, including:
• Freelance journalist Kate Arkless Gray
• William Perrin with the hyperlocal news project Talk about Local
• The Telegraph's Kate Day
• Rob McKinnon who works with e-government projects in the UK and New Zealand
• Toby Moores, Visiting Professor of the Institute of Creative Technology at De Montfort University
• Adam Tinworth
• and Tony Hirst of Open University and of the excellent blog OUseful
They raise several possibilities about the future of news including Hirst's suggestion that technologists and academics should become more involved in the news process, Day's hope for richer story telling methods and Perrin's view that the future is hyperlocal.
