Barcelona Littleshell

Some innovations for video in the newsroom at the GEN summit in Barcelona came from competitions parallel to the event: Editors Lab Hackdays and Startups for News Battle. The winners of the Editors Lab Hackday final competition, @JoshTBoswell @EoinTunstead and @aendrew from The Times, proposed ‘a seamless truly multimedia experience.’  Their prototype   allows journalists to insert small video play buttons in between the copy of the article, allowing readers to view snippets as they read. It is worth to mention that the code is opensource. They even had time to  blog about  it.  Don’t miss following next year’s GEN Editors Lab Hackdays on this website. The quality of what teams from all over the world have been able to produce in 48 hours in this season 2013-2014 makes you think how much better content some papers could produce if more and more newsrooms took hackathons more seriously and knocked down the walls between journalists and programmer...

On a very intense second day at the GEN Summit, most of us followed Cory Haik, Executive Producer and Senior Editor, inside  The Washington Post ’s digital strategy. ‘The correlation between social media, in particular twitter, and our mobile traffic is total,’ she stressed. Cory Haik at the GEN Summit 2014 During the 18-day US Government shutdown in 2013, the Post created an app to ask mobile users how intensely it was affecting them and, thanks to geolocalization, the results were mapped. They also experimented using Google Glass at the White House correspondents' dinner and sharing content via  snapchat . ‘Readers’ needs are different if they are at the airport or on the couch,’ said Haik. Social media, mostly used on mobiles, play an essential role, too. ‘Part of my job is to take the conversations that are happening, summarize them and reflect on that,’ she added The paper -shouldn’t we maybe start to call them something else?-, calls its approach adapti...

Thinking South-to-South was the next big topic of the first day at the GEN Summit in Barcelona and I felt sorry that half the audience had left the room by the end of the sessions. “How much dialogue is there between what we call the political South,” wondered Sami Zeidan, from Al Jazeera, having recently been to South America. Representatives with experience in developing countries had a lot to say. Wadah Khanfar at the GEN Summit 14 “The world was summarized and centralized in the West. It was our cultural narrative,” stated Wadah Khanfar, President of Al Sharq Forum and former Director General of the Al Jazeera Network. Years ago, when newsrooms looked at a model to follow, “for us in the East, it was London; for others it was the United States or France. Now it isn’t the case,” he sentenced. He also advocated for journalism in depth.  “We need our newsrooms to become think tanks, not technology laboratories,” he added. Joyce Barnathan, President of the  Interna...

I have recently been covering the Global Editors Network Summit in Barcelona and publishing articles on their website . Here is the first one: Automated journalism marked the start of the GEN Summit in Barcelona. 'It is the next logical step: let the computer do one more task,' said moderator Yves Eudes from Le Monde. News-writing computers make journalists feel their jobs are at risk and also 'Who wouldn’t like to get rid of journalists?' he inquired humorously. Some impressive first experiments of robot journalism were then shown.   Robot Journalism Bootcamp    Global Editors Network Among them,  NarrativeScience  uses Quill, an artificial intelligence platform to generate stories from data. For the time being, they are mostly about sports and business. 'The reason why some of these stories are not written by people is because there isn’t enough interest,' said Larry Birnbaum, from Northwestern University, who also mentioned 52,000 school descrip...