Developing and Evaluating Digital Creativity Support in Google Docs for Journalists

Abstract

Although journalism is classified as one of the creative industries, there is little bespoke digital support for creative thinking by journalists. To fill the gap, this paper reports new research that led to the implementation and first evaluation of JUICE, a new digital prototype to support creative thinking by journalists during the early development of news stories. Emerging from a usercentred design process, JUICE is implemented as a simple Add-on Sidebar and Dialog Box in Google Docs that a journalist can invoke when developing news stories. Interviews with experienced journalists were used to elicit 6 strategies that JUICE uses to guide its users to generate different angles on news stories using creative information searches and interactive creativity support. In this paper we describe the information search algorithm and new interactive support to create news stories with one of these strategies -the individual human angle on the story -then report a first evaluation of JUICE implemented with the algorithm and support during its use by journalism students. Results revealed that most of these student journalists were able use JUICE to generate new news stories with individual human angles in a short period of time, but still used established web search tools to collect more detailed information about the angle in order to write the story. Journalist feedback was used to improve the usability of JUICE and design new interactive features.

Evaluating the Use of Digital Creativity Support by Journalists in Newsrooms

“…It was built to support human-centred creative cognition [23], a process in which idea generation about new angles took place concurrently with information search. To support a journalist to discover new angles more productively, INJECT automatically retrieved news information with creative strategies that codified the expertise of experienced journalists [29]. And to increase a journalist's creativity capabilities, INJECT presented the retrieved information with interactive creative guidance to support the journalist to generate new angles on news articles.…”

“…During some of these deployments, journalists used a bespoke digital platform to report software bugs and new requirements. More details are reported in [29,31].…”

“…A journalist clicked 1 of 6 icons also shown in Figure 1 to invoke 6 corresponding creative strategies to search for information about: (1) quantitative data associated with the new article; (2) people associated with the new article; (3) events associated with the article's background; (4) comical information associated with the article; (5) future consequences of the article, and; (6) published visualizations of data and information associated with the article. Each of these strategies implemented the codified expertise of experienced journalists [29] using natural language parsing, word sense disambiguation and query expansion algorithms to search information in over 12million (and growing) indexed news articles from over 300 news sources written in 6 different European languages. Furthermore, to support journalists to discover new topic angles using more contextspecific sources, INJECT also indexed and retrieved news information from available local news archives.…”

Making the News

“…However, support for journalist creative thinking is limited. Most content management systems and search engines only have keyword search functions to discover information sources [18], and require journalists already to know and describe the creative angles to investigate. Interactive creativity support tools exist for different creative industries (e.g.…”

Business models for academic prototypes: A new approach to media innovation

“…Brock promotes experimentation as a key factor for both legacy media and startups: "Success or failure will be determined by the quantity and quality of experiments to find out what works" (Brock, 2013, p. 5). For example, Maiden, Zachos, Lockerbie, Brock, and Traver (2016) are attempting to transform an existing academic prototype for dementia care into a journalistic service called JUICE. This is a tool for creative support to journalists during the research and writing phase, with a focus on hard news.…”