NYT to release open-source “document viewer” for investigative journalism

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To help create their fantastic piece about Hillary Clinton’s White House schedules, the NYT developed a tool to aid them in analysis of the enormous amount of information that the schedules contained.

Today at the Online News Association conference, Aron Pilhofer, editor of interactive news tech at the NYT, told a session audience that they are planning to release this tool as an open-source project!

(He said it’ll be on Amazon EC2, though I’m not sure exactly what that’ll amount to.)

Details are slim, but this seems like a pretty cool thing. Pilhofer didn’t give a timeline on this project, or on their previously-announced news API, but both are on the way.

I’m guessing it’ll be after the election. They’re probably pretty busy creating all those kick-ass visualizations.

UPDATE: Be sure to check Aron’s comment below. It will be open source, but they’ll also deploy it to EC2 for folks to use instantly.

Help! What’s a great news problem to solve?

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Rich Gordon’s got programmers but no project:

Between now and when the [next Medill innovation project] starts (Sept. 23), we have to decide what the focus of the project will be. In my experience with previous projects, the key is to come up with an interesting challenge or question for the students to explore.

Right now there are two competing ideas, neither of them yet specific enough to organize the class around:

  • Civic engagement through online conversations
  • Mobile content and services

This project will be my primary focus for the next three months. We’ve got a great team, but we’re still hunting for a killer idea. What’s a great news problem to solve?

As for the platform, I’m leaning towards Android. (Admittedly, I’m putting the cart waaay in front of the horse here. The platform should always follow the idea, buuut…) The new gear from Google’s phone project is coming soon, and I agree with John Biggs at TechCrunch:

An open, powerful platform backed by a major, web-focused corporation is better than a useless accretion of outdated functions owned by a Borg-like conglomerate [Microsoft] or an OS created by a gnomic, arbitrarily pissy design company [Apple] in my book.

What do you think six budding new media journalists, two of whom code, should do for a quarter? Ryan and I could hack something pretty substantial in three months!

Any ideas?

CNN’s new embedded videos (Plus: Why headline widgets suck it)

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ReadWriteWeb sez:

Starting today, CNN will allow all users to embed videos from CNN on their blogs or social network profiles. With this, CNN is following a growing trend among news organizations like MSNBC, FoxNews, and CBS. … CNN is clearly hoping to see some of its clips go viral, and with the political season in the U.S. heating up in the run-up to the November election, they might just have chosen the right time to enable this feature.

http://www.cnn.com/video/savp/evp/?loc=dom&vid=/video/international/2008/08/22/curry.bollywood.best.cnn

It doesn’t work perfectly yet: I couldn’t get the embed button to work properly in my browser (Firefox on Ubuntu Linux, it works on my Windows virtual machine), and for some reason the embed button is disabled on the front page item on the video site (maybe a conscious choice, but if you’re clever enough to find the video at the bottom of the page and click it, the button comes to life.). UPDATE: the button doesn’t work until you click play. Doh.

Why I hate widgets

Embedded video players look a little like their evil twin, headline widgets, which (sorry, 10K) always always always suck.

Widgets are arrogant. They give me the privilege to advertise for you.

An embed lets me add value to your content.

It gives me power to create something new.

LAME —>

http://wgtclsp.msnbc.com/o/475cfb3039f9920b/48af690e05fd8e7f/48ab0da07e4e456d/92e54aa3

Flickr adds embeddable slideshows! Yaaay!

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I use Flickr lots. For sharing little videos in my river blog posts, for finding creative-commons-licensed images to accompany my news stories, and for sharing my pictures with the world so that they might find their way into neat places like the Wikipedia.

And now I can embed slideshows! Woo!

http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=58979

Click the little arrows-in-a-box icon for fullscreen.

UPDATE: They also added videos to slide shows. They play automagically. (There are a few videos at the end of this set, if you’d like a demo.)

http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=58979

I love Flickr.

(Thanks to ReadWriteWeb and Mashable for the heads up.)

Hate, props, and hotness: restoring journalism’s credibility

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Journalism.co.uk sez:

NewsCred, a website aimed at gauging the credibility of online news, has been launched in a beta. The site, which aims to help users find ‘the highest quality and most credible news online’, has created a digital newspaper of aggregated articles, which are voted on by users.

NewsCred is some really neat shit. It ain’t breaking news that journalism’s got a bit of a credibility problem — okay, a disasterous credibility problem. When we lose our cred, we’ve got nothing! Credibility is journalism’s *only* currency. Who do you believe? Blog X or The New York Times?

Why is our credibility in the crapper?

Hotness. MSNBC, Fox News, and the 24 hour news cycle. Speculation, opinion and spectacle have ruined the news. Every time we report on flag pins, pregnant dudes or autism-causing vaccinations, god kills a kitten.

The news needs way less hotness, fast. That’s why I’m into NewsCred, it’s the Digg-shaped anti-Digg. It’s not about what’s hot. It’s about what’s good.

NewsCred\'s credit and discredit buttons

Jeff Jarvis completely disagrees:

I think these folks are attacking the problem from the wrong perspective. They’re trying to play whack-a-mole with credibility and identify all the bad stuff — just as news people, long accustomed to packaging the world in a pretty box with a bow on top, keep wanting to kill every bad comment on their sites. They’ll fail.

All social apps need to get the secret sauce just right — and most totally fail. Only time will tell if NewsCred has legs, but hell, even if it ain’t perfect, they’re at least barking up the right tree.

(For several examples of new media journalism that’s barking up the wrong tree, check out the DayLife Developer Challenge winners. They were made by lovely people I’m certain, so, sorry for being a hater, but dang — it’s just a bunch of shiny shiny.)

NewsCred is trying to solve a real problem: the disaffected news audience. Yes, this encourages readers to be haters, but they can also give props to the good stuff. Journalism has a credibility problem largely because journalists are producing lots of crap. We need to be vetted.

Zed Shaw says “The Internet needs identity, reputation, and retribution.” Readers know who we are, and rely on our reputations, but comments and letters to the editor are hardly retribution. If we publish junk, we should get buried.

Bring on the hate. No more kittens have to die.