(Annette Moser-Wellman)

Less investigative reporting? Less high-quality news available? These are frequently heard concerns as news organizations struggle for survival. But what if the disruption in the market for news and information could lead to fresh, new media products that have yet to be imagined?

This is the view of Dr. Irfan Essa, Professor in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. Essa works in the areas of human computer interaction and artificial intelligence and coined the term "computational journalism."

"Imagine an article written by your favorite news organization about your neighborhood that offers background data you can personally customize or visualize in a myriad of ways and provides access to experts in your area to for perspective," Essa said, describing the future of news as an intersection between breakthroughs in computation and the highest-order journalism.

"Computational journalism is an entirely new way of thinking about how information is captured, shared and processed," he said. "From accessing data online to broad-scale, eyewitness reporting, journalists will be increasingly able to get closer to raw data and tools to contextualize information so they can make judgments relevant to their audiences. Our research is about extracting content from images, videos and text to enable more intelligent news gathering. The combined fields of computation and journalism support a new kind of highly informed participant in the public conversation."

Essa believes there is an opportunity for journalists to use technology to reinforce their civic role in society. He notes the emerging smart technologies like semantics that use metadata instead of key words for quality search. These types of tools will allow for more efficient scouring of public records and multiple databases.

Essa's team is pioneering research in identifying video and image content in ways that make it more accessible for reporting. He believes that providing deeper levels of access to information can allow the journalist to data-mine large amounts of information and thus be able to provide more in-depth and customized reporting for their audiences. The journalists' storytelling and watchdog functions can be enhanced by the ability of the computer to automatically visualize data just as PowerPoint might with a graph or a pie chart. It's this ability to harness large amounts of data for individual and public interest that defines the computational journalist.

"Citizen journalism is perhaps misunderstood. Citizens are not contextualizing on their environment. They are merely letting you see what they just saw. They are an advanced form of eyewitness. Bloggers are not directly journalists. Generally, they are expressing their opinion. They are, in essence, writing editorials," he said.

A journalist, on the other hand, "is trained to contextualize what has been seen and experienced," Essa notes. He believes that journalists armed with the advanced tools of computation will have access to more and better data than any one person, enabling them to aggregate and assimilate information with higher levels of accuracy and less bias. Thus, Essa believes computation can elevate the quality of investigative reporting and news gathering.

"There is a dire need for better information to be given to citizens. We are in an era where people are focused only about what they are interested in. But if we can get both journalists and citizens the best information out there and let them navigate the information without the ‘noise' of unwanted data, this will draw audiences who want higher level information and more contextualization," he said.

An example of this contextualization Essa shares is a partnership between American Public Media and Minnesota Public Radio called Public Insight Network, a database of experts in different areas in Minneapolis on topics from farm policy to family budgets. MPR consults those who sign up as a resources pool and asks them questions to help provide insight and information about a particular area they may be reporting. These types of sites help journalists capture the broadest information possible and provide the customized information that customers want.

Additionally, computational journalism can help tailor information to individuals. "Google and the New York Times do a good job of aggregating information from news sources. But I have to go through about 10 articles to find what's relevant to me," Essa said. "Would it not be great if tools were available for news organizations to help individuals navigate and pinpoint exactly what is relevant to them and provide in it a dynamic and compelling way?"

Far from seeing a bleak future for journalism and news, Essa sees a future in which technology helps restore journalism's civic role in society - where the market demand for customized news and information serves the public interest.

"Journalism benefits from information quality. How can we get more authentic information? How can we get more verifiable information? How can we increase information quality in the era where anybody and everybody can have a voice? These are the question computational journalism will answer," he believes.


Annette Moser-Wellman is President of Firemark, Inc., an innovation consultancy, and author of Six Competencies of the Next Generation News Organization and Running While The Earth Shakes: Creating An Innovation Strategy To Win In The Digital Age, both published by the Media Management Center.

This TechScout article is part of a series of Moser-Wellman interviews commissioned by the Media Management Center to explore opportunities and insights at the intersection of technology and the news media. Click here to view other articles in the TechScout series.

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