Newsroom 3.0: Managing Technological and Media Convergence in Contemporary Newsrooms

News consumers are changing their way of accessing and interacting with news content, of which they are now prosumers (combined producers and consumers). Consequently, communication organizations are facing great challenges posed by the decrease of paying readers and the competition imposed by emergent technologies that allow new forms to produce and disseminate news. To understand the role of the journalists and their managers in this challenge, we investigate how top news organizations are tackling this crisis. The results of this research, of a qualitative and exploratory nature, led us to propose a framework - Newsroom 3.0 - of a collaborative environment to support the production of news in an integrated, convergent and cybernetic newsroom. Newsroom 3.0 will provide support to the work of interdisciplinary teams, in respect of the coordination of the activities developed, as well as the cooperative production of content and communication between newsroom professionals and news prosumers

Journalistic Knowledge Platforms: from Idea to Realisation

Journalistiske kunnskapsplattformer (JKPer) er en type intelligente informasjonssystemer designet for å forbedre nyhetsproduksjonsprosesser ved å kombinere stordata, kunstig intelligens (KI) og kunnskapsbaser for å støtte journalister. Til tross for sitt potensial for å revolusjonere journalistikkfeltet, har adopsjonen av JKPer vært treg, med forskere og store nyhetsutløp involvert i forskning og utvikling av JKPer. Den langsomme adopsjonen kan tilskrives den tekniske kompleksiteten til JKPer, som har ført til at nyhetsorganisasjoner stoler på flere uavhengige og oppgavespesifikke produksjonssystemer. Denne situasjonen kan øke ressurs- og koordineringsbehovet og kostnadene, samtidig som den utgjør en trussel om å miste kontrollen over data og havne i leverandørlåssituasjoner. De tekniske kompleksitetene forblir en stor hindring, ettersom det ikke finnes en allerede godt utformet systemarkitektur som ville lette realiseringen og integreringen av JKPer på en sammenhengende måte over tid. Denne doktoravhandlingen bidrar til teorien og praksisen rundt kunnskapsgrafbaserte JKPer ved å studere og designe en programvarearkitektur som referanse for å lette iverksettelsen av konkrete løsninger og adopsjonen av JKPer. Den første bidraget til denne doktoravhandlingen gir en grundig og forståelig analyse av ideen bak JKPer, fra deres opprinnelse til deres nåværende tilstand. Denne analysen gir den første studien noensinne av faktorene som har bidratt til den langsomme adopsjonen, inkludert kompleksiteten i deres sosiale og tekniske aspekter, og identifiserer de største utfordringene og fremtidige retninger for JKPer. Den andre bidraget presenterer programvarearkitekturen som referanse, som gir en generisk blåkopi for design og utvikling av konkrete JKPer. Den foreslåtte referansearkitekturen definerer også to nye typer komponenter ment for å opprettholde og videreutvikle KI-modeller og kunnskapsrepresentasjoner. Den tredje presenterer et eksempel på iverksettelse av programvarearkitekturen som referanse og beskriver en prosess for å forbedre effektiviteten til informasjonsekstraksjonspipelines. Denne rammen muliggjør en fleksibel, parallell og samtidig integrering av teknikker for naturlig språkbehandling og KI-verktøy. I tillegg diskuterer denne avhandlingen konsekvensene av de nyeste KI-fremgangene for JKPer og ulike etiske aspekter ved bruk av JKPer. Totalt sett gir denne PhD-avhandlingen en omfattende og grundig analyse av JKPer, fra teorien til designet av deres tekniske aspekter. Denne forskningen tar sikte på å lette vedtaket av JKPer og fremme forskning på dette feltet.Journalistic Knowledge Platforms (JKPs) are a type of intelligent information systems designed to augment news creation processes by combining big data, artificial intelligence (AI) and knowledge bases to support journalists. Despite their potential to revolutionise the field of journalism, the adoption of JKPs has been slow, with scholars and large news outlets involved in the research and development of JKPs. The slow adoption can be attributed to the technical complexity of JKPs that led news organisation to rely on multiple independent and task-specific production system. This situation can increase the resource and coordination footprint and costs, at the same time it poses a threat to lose control over data and face vendor lock-in scenarios. The technical complexities remain a major obstacle as there is no existing well-designed system architecture that would facilitate the realisation and integration of JKPs in a coherent manner over time. This PhD Thesis contributes to the theory and practice on knowledge-graph based JKPs by studying and designing a software reference architecture to facilitate the instantiation of concrete solutions and the adoption of JKPs. The first contribution of this PhD Thesis provides a thorough and comprehensible analysis of the idea of JKPs, from their origins to their current state. This analysis provides the first-ever study of the factors that have contributed to the slow adoption, including the complexity of their social and technical aspects, and identifies the major challenges and future directions of JKPs. The second contribution presents the software reference architecture that provides a generic blueprint for designing and developing concrete JKPs. The proposed reference architecture also defines two novel types of components intended to maintain and evolve AI models and knowledge representations. The third presents an instantiation example of the software reference architecture and details a process for improving the efficiency of information extraction pipelines. This framework facilitates a flexible, parallel and concurrent integration of natural language processing techniques and AI tools. Additionally, this Thesis discusses the implications of the recent AI advances on JKPs and diverse ethical aspects of using JKPs. Overall, this PhD Thesis provides a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of JKPs, from the theory to the design of their technical aspects. This research aims to facilitate the adoption of JKPs and advance research in this field.Doktorgradsavhandlin

Search Engine Optimisation in UK news production

This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Journalism Practice, 5(4), 462 - 477, 2011, copyright Taylor & Francis, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/17512786.2010.551020.This paper represents an exploratory study into an emerging culture in UK online newsrooms—the practice of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), which assesses its impact on news production. Comprising a short-term participant observational case study at a national online news publisher, and a series of semi-structured, in-depth interviews with SEO professionals at three further UK media organisations, the author sets out to establish how SEO is operationalised in the newsroom, and what consequences these practices have for online news production. SEO practice is found to be varied and application is not universal. Not all UK news organisations are making the most of SEO even though some publishers take a highly sophisticated approach. Efforts are constrained by time, resources and management support, as well as off-page technical issues. SEO policy is found, in some cases, to inform editorial policy, but there is resistance to the principal of SEO driving decision-making. Several themes are established which call for further research

Supporting Newsrooms with Journalistic Knowledge Graph Platforms: Current State and Future Directions

Increasing competition and loss of revenues force newsrooms to explore new digital solutions. The new solutions employ artificial intelligence and big data techniques such as machine learning and knowledge graphs to manage and support the knowledge work needed in all stages of news production. The result is an emerging type of intelligent information system we have called the Journalistic Knowledge Platform (JKP). In this paper, we analyse for the first time knowledge graph-based JKPs in research and practice. We focus on their current state, challenges, opportunities and future directions. Our analysis is based on 14 platforms reported in research carried out in collaboration with news organisations and industry partners and our experiences with developing knowledge graph-based JKPs along with an industry partner. We found that: (a) the most central contribution of JKPs so far is to automate metadata annotation and monitoring tasks; (b) they also increasingly contribute to improving background information and content analysis, speeding-up newsroom workflows and providing newsworthy insights; (c) future JKPs need better mechanisms to extract information from textual and multimedia news items; (d) JKPs can provide a digitalisation path towards reduced production costs and improved information quality while adapting the current workflows of newsrooms to new forms of journalism and readers’ demands.publishedVersio

Intelligent Technologies Shaping Business Models for Journalistic Content Provision: A Concept Matrix

There has been much discussion about how intelligent technologies shape journalistic content provision. Common buzz words are data-driven and automated journalism. To address this issue, we conduct on a two-phase, systemic literature review in order to develop an integrated Concept Matrix (Webster & Watson 2002) on how intelligent technologies - here natural language generation, predictive intelligence algorithms, and latent semantic indexing - shape the business models of journalistic content provision. We offer insights regarding \u27roles of\u27 intelligent technologies and how they drive for\u27 business models as we find that they, will make the difference also in journalism as in many other already or soon digital industries

A software reference architecture for journalistic knowledge platforms

Newsrooms and journalists today rely on many different artificial-intelligence, big-data and knowledge-based systems to support efficient and high-quality journalism. However, making the different systems work together remains a challenge, calling for new unified journalistic knowledge platforms. A software reference architecture for journalistic knowledge platforms could help news organisations by capturing tried-and-tested best practices and providing a generic blueprint for how their IT infrastructure should evolve. To the best of our knowledge, no suitable architecture has been proposed in the literature. Therefore, this article proposes a software reference architecture for integrating artificial intelligence and knowledge bases to support journalists and newsrooms. The design of the proposed architecture is grounded on the research literature and on our experiences with developing a series of prototypes in collaboration with industry. Our aim is to make it easier for news organisations to evolve their existing independent systems for news production towards integrated knowledge platforms and to direct further research. Because journalists and newsrooms are early adopters of integrated knowledge platforms, our proposal can hopefully also inform architectures in other domains with similar needs.publishedVersio

Interactive infographics and news values

This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Digital Journalism [PUBLICATION DETAILS], copyright @ Taylor & Francis, available online at http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/21670811.2013.841368.This study is concerned with the news values and working practices that inform the creation of interactive infographics in UK online news. The author draws upon organisational theory in journalism studies, and considers how conventional journalistic news values compare with best practice as espoused in different literatures within this field. A series of open-ended, depth interviews with visual news journalists from the UK national media were undertaken, along with a short-term observation case study at a national online news publisher. Journalistic and organisational norms are found to shape the selection, production, and treatment of interactive graphics, and a degree of variation is found to exist amongst practitioners as to definitions of quality in this field. Some news stories are considered to be better suited to rendering in interactive form than others. The availability of “big data” does not drive decision-making in itself, but some numbers are considered more newsworthy than others. Budgetary constraint drives practice and limits potential in this field. Risk aversion, embodied in various forms; from the use of templates, to a perceived need to avoid audience complaint, is found to dampen experimentation. Detailed audience research was found to inform the choice of methods used in data visualisation at one national news producer. This warrants further investigation as to how audiences engage with news interactives, and what the framing of news in certain (preferred) data visualisation formats means in terms of how news is understood

Multimedia news storytelling: semiotic-narratological foundations

Research about multimedia news storytelling contains several empirical studies, but these lack a theoretical foundation. This article proposes a transdisciplinary foundation of multimedia news storytelling, based on semiotics and narratology. First, the bases of multimedia news storytelling are explained using a hypothetical-deductive methodology and the semiotic categories of ideation-composition-reception. Second, based on narratology, the multimedia storytelling process is described, starting from the pre-compositive stage, in which journalists assemble the stories, to the final stage of navigation by the participatory users. The combination of both theoretical foundations allows us to explain the nature of multimedia news storytelling, based on three elements: 1) syntactic coherence between the multiple languages used, 2) open and collective authorship, and 3) participatory reception by the audience

Multimedia news storytelling: Semiotic-narratological foundations

Producción CientíficaResearch about multimedia news storytelling contains several empirical studies, but these lack a theoretical foundation. This article proposes a transdisciplinary foundation of multimedia news storytelling, based on semiotics and narratology. First, the bases of multimedia news storytelling are explained using a hypothetical-deductive methodology and the semiotic categories of ideation-composition-reception. Second, based on narratology, the multimedia storytelling process is described, starting from the pre-compositive stage, in which journalists assemble the stories, to the final stage of navigation by the participatory users. The combination of both theoretical foundations allows us to explain the nature of multimedia news storytelling, based on three elements: 1) syntactic coherence between the multiple languages used, 2)open and collective authorship, and 3) participatory reception by the audience.Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades (Proyecto RTI2018-093346-B-C31

Engage students in news writing

The technologies evolution impacts how information is produced and consumed by users. Nonetheless, with the spread of information content available on most online news platforms, the misinformation increases alongside the less credible content. In this scope, the present research aims to develop a technological ecosystem to promote students’ writing ability. The system will help students, search for credible content to create school newspapers. Thus, in this article, the architecture of the solution for news writing tool for the Portuguese language is presented. This paper aims to introduce a constructive approach that presents the system architecture that will support the development of a news creation tool.publishe