The Promise of Computational Journalism

Abstract

Computational journalism involves the application of software and technologies to the activities of journalism, and it draws from the fields of computer science, the social sciences, and media and communications. New technologies may enhance the traditional aims of journalism, or may initiate greater interaction between journalists and information and communication technology (ICT) specialists. The enhanced use of computing in news production is related in particular to three factors: larger government datasets becoming more widely available; the increasingly sophisticated and ubiquitous nature of software; and the developing digital economy. Drawing upon international examples, this paper argues that computational journalism techniques may provide new foundations for original investigative journalism and increase the scope for new forms of interaction with readers. Computational journalism provides a major opportunity to enhance the production of original investigative journalism, and to attract and retain readers online.

The Future of Journalism

“…Data journalism involves interrogating large data sets, that may be crowdsourced, and hence initial assessments of the possible contribution of data journalism is judged to be to enhance news production, with particular emphasis on the potential to invigorate investigative journalism (Gray, Chambers, and Bounegru 2012). Data journalism has affinities with what Meyer (1991) termed "precision journalism" and (Flew et al (2012) designated "computational journalism" (Karlsen and Stavelin 2014). In the United Kingdom, the Guardian newspaper has done much to pioneer practitioner developments in data journalism, while in the academy this new genre is emerging rather than established and scholarly literature is relatively sparse; a special issue of Digital Journalism (3.3) intends to profile this new area of scholarship within the journalism studies field.…”

Algorithms for journalism: The future of news work

“…The rapid development of software-generated news coincides with a quantitative and computational shift in journalism where reporters are feeling more confident in using statistical methods for mining and analysing data and creating stories based on this material (Anderson, 2011;Coddington, 2015;Cohen, Li, Yang, & Yu, 2011;Flew, Spurgeon, Daniel, & Swift, 2012;Howard, 2014;Parasie & Dagiral, 2012). For instance, machine learning techniques have become an integral part of editorial work at big media companies such as the Guardian, Reuters, and the New York Times.…”

Simulating Data Journalism to Communicate Hydrological Information from Sensor Networks

“…Computational journalism is a general field that involves applying information technologies to journalism activities [4,7]. A more specific approach is summarizing news from documents by applying text summarization techniques and web mining [15].…”