News

This report explores the industry of Internet measurement and its impact on news organizations working online. It investigates this landscape through a combination of documentary research and interviews with measurement companies, trade groups, advertising agencies, media scholars, and journalists from national newspapers, regional papers, and online-only news ventures.

Project leads: Lucas Graves, John Kelly

Team member: Marissa Gluck

This project explores a new artificial intelligence tool—expert systems—that has the potential to aid journalists to quickly and efficiently discover public affairs stories in large public datasets. The logistics of performing data journalism have proved formidable for many news organizations. The project’s Creating a Story Discovery Engine would allow the local press to use it to write stories without having to fund its development or hire and manage a software staff.

Project lead: Meredith Broussard

In total this project produced three book chapters, two conference papers, an academic journal article, and a magazine article. The authors also wrote a total of 16 articles for various forms of news media including blogs as well as outlets like the Washington Post, Slate, and MIT Technology Review. Seven workshops were taught relating to the topics of the subawards including workshops related to investigating algorithms and designing news bots. Twenty-seven public presentations were given as part of the subaward, including keynotes to investigative journalists in Europe and Canada, as well as numerous panels and talks discussing algorithmic accountability and transparency. Five open source repositories were published. 

The authors built and launched algorithmtips.org, which is a database of leads, as well as a community resource for journalists interested in beginning to investigate algorithms. The site attracts almost 1000 visitors per month (with high site engagement as people are looking through the database), and has attracted a handful of dedicated volunteers who are helping to expand the coverage of the database. The authors published a research paper at the Computation + Journalism Symposium in 2017 detailing how they built the database and laying out their plans for scaling up the efforts. 

Diakopoulos' work relating to the ethics of algorithms was influential in crafting the Association for Computing Machinery's ethics guide relating to algorithmic transparency and accountability, which has since been adopted in Europe as well. 

Project lead: Nicholas Diakopoulos

Platforms and Publishers is a multi-year project researching the relationship between journalism and social platforms in order to promote mutual understanding and best practices for conducting journalism on the social web.

In the rush to capture audiences and establish new commercial businesses the impact on the citizen rather than consumer is often overlooked. Non-commercial functions of the free press, such as defending free speech, protecting vulnerable sources, resisting government pressure for censorship, practicing commercial transparency, are new requirements for technology companies.

This project will provide news publishers and journalists with a more granular understanding of how journalism and independent publishing is affected by integration with social media, and how platform companies are also having to adapt to a new role. It will engage software and social platform companies in understanding best practices for supporting ethical journalism in a new environment.

We’d love to hear from you if you are grappling with the issues of publishing and monetizing distributed content. Please get in touch with Meritxell Roca: m.roca [at] columbia [dot] edu.

To learn more about the project, read our latest white paper “The Platform Press: How Silicon Valley Reengineered Journalism” and explore our interactive Platforms and Publishers: A Definitive Timeline which identifies key developments on tech platforms used by journalism publishers.

If you are interested in learning more or working with us, email Nushin Rashidian, research lead on the Platforms and Publishers project.

Project lead: Emily Bell

Team members: Pete Brown, Elizabeth Hansen, Nushin Rashidian, Nausicaa Renner, Claire Wardle, Kathy Zhang

This report explores how chat apps alter reportage, allowing journalists to acquire multimedia information, pursue stories, access private networks (particularly in contexts of censorship), and organize news production. Chat apps are becoming a common tool for newsgathering; they allow journalists to sit in on conversations and get in touch with potential sources, particularly in countries such as China where more public social media (such as Facebook and Twitter) are not as commonly used. Today, the most popular chat app, WhatsApp, has more than one billion monthly active users. Young, mobile people have shifted away from public networks to private chat apps because they are easier to use and offer greater privacy under surveillance. The report is a case study of chat apps usage in covering the recent youth protests in Hong Kong.

Project lead: Valerie Belair-Gagnon

Team members: Colin Agur, Nick Frisch

This report provides an analysis of the maturation of technology coverage. Some of the most novel critiques about technology and Silicon Valley are coming from women and underrepresented minorities, but their work is seldom recognized in traditional critical venues. Acknowledging the realities of society and culture, this report offers readers the tools and framings for thinking about their relationship to technology and their relationship to power. Besides deconstructing, naming, and interpreting technological phenomena, criticism has the potential to assemble new insights and interpretations around the role of technology in society.

Project lead: Sara Watson

This project developed a way to simplify satellite data collection and interpretation, allowing journalists, urbanists, humanitarian agencies, and others to mine valuable information from satellite imagery during urban conflicts or natural disasters. The result is an open-source, interactive, layered map of Aleppo at the neighborhood scale. The layered satellite imagery allows the identification of sites of destruction over the course of the civil war, as well as analysis of changing landmarks and borders, and tracking of refugee populations.

Project lead: Laura Kurgan

Team members: Dare Brawley, Madeeha Merchant

The fact that podcasts cannot be easily snipped and shared online is inhibiting the growth of the podcast industry. Working with the public radio show This American Life, a team of developers and designers created a functioning prototype that allows users to easily convert audio clips into snippets, including transcription and .mp4 videos, and share them online.

Project lead: Stephanie Foo

This project investigates the strategic Twitter engagement of political journalists and the corresponding dynamics of newsroom strategies, individual behavior, and the changing conditions of different news climates and socio-political environments. Findings show journalists’ individual approaches to and skills of tweeting vary and range across a broad spectrum, from submitting to the mandates of organizational social media policies, to feeling competitive pressures and “fear of missing out,” or making substantive investments into Twitter because the platform is viewed as a potential career asset in an unstable labor market.

Project lead: Svenja Ottovordemgentschenfelde

Over the summer of 2016, the Tow Center for Digital Journalism partnered with the Democracy Fund Voice to develop a series of white papers that looked at the effect the election cycle had on amplifying false fears about terrorist attacks and Muslims in America. The Tow Center delivered three thought-provoking papers and a series of events ahead of the U.S. presidential election cycle.

This research paper identified key benefits of design philosophy in creating new possibilities for journalism, including the ability to rapidly prototype and modify new products before major resources have been committed; to improve journalism by deeply understanding its role in the real lives of those who consume it; and to work directly with the communities in which news organizations are embedded to generate coverage and tell stories of direct relevance. This report also cautions against making editorial decisions solely in favor of stories and products that bring the most success in financial terms.

Project lead: Heather Chaplin

This research focuses on the intersection of citizen journalism and digital activism, producing a comprehensive database of international incidents of civic activism and non-violent conflict in which digital media had some role in the evolution of events. The project developed original data and the visualization and query tools to make all the data accessible to journalists and the public through Creative Commons licensing.

Project lead: Philip Howard

This report examines the digital security tools that American journalists are currently using following the Snowden affair, from secure email and chat protocols to fully anonymized whistleblowing platforms. These encryption practices help ensure the conditions of source protection that are necessary for a healthy press.

Project lead: Charles Berrett

This report illustrates responses to systemic social problems in underrepresented and stigmatized communities at the local level. The research shows that residents often use alternative digital sources to cross-check stories and seek other information to help navigate and critically interpret mainstream local coverage. Participants said they would be more likely to seek out news and share stories if solutions journalism were more common. In communities with a long history of overwhelmingly negative coverage, stories featuring community perspectives that take a critical look at responses to social problems offer an opportunity to strengthen connections between residents, media, and community organizations.

Project leads: Daniela Gerson, Evelyn Moreno, Andrea Wenzel

This report brings together many fields to explore where data comes from, how to analyze it, and how to communicate results. Some of these ideas are thousands of years old, and some were developed only a decade ago—all of them have come together to create the 21st century practice of data journalism. This report serves as an introductory guidebook for journalists on the process of quantification, analysis, and communication using data.

Project lead: Jonathan Stray