contributed;articles

Doi: 10.1145/2001269.2001288

A similar push is also under way in investigative and public-affairs reporting. Researchers and journalists are exploring new methods, sources, and ways of linking communities to the information they need to govern themselves. A new field is emerging to promote the process: computational journalism. Broadly defined, it can involve changing how stories are discovered, presented, aggregated, monetized, and archived. Computation can advance journalism by drawing on innovations in topic detection, video analysis, personalization, aggregation, visualization, and sensemaking. 6–8, 13

Here, we focus on an aspect of computational journalism with a particularly powerful potential impact on the public good: tools to support accountability reporting. Building on the experience of an earlier generation of computer-assisted reporting, journalists and computer scientists are developing new ways to reduce the cost and difficulty of in-depth public-affairs reporting.

This aspect of computational journalism faces technical challenges ranging from how to transform pa-per-based documents into searchable repositories to how to transcribe collections of public video records. It also faces difficulty applying existing technology through user interfaces that accommodate the specific needs of journalists. Finally, it faces cultural challenges, as computer scientists trained in the ways of information meet journalists immersed in the production of news. If it is able to

computational
Journalism
BY saRah cohen, James t. hamiLton, anD fReD tuRneR

How computer scientists can empower journalists, democracy’s watchdogs, in the production of news in the public interest.

THANKS IN No small part to the modern computer’s ability to gather and disseminate seemingly limitless amounts and types of data, the institutions on which the public depends for information about government are melting away. To some this shift may look like a good deal: Why not trade a few newspapers for what appears to be infinite access to information? But as news staffs decline, so too does the public’s ability to monitor power.

If there’s a silver lining in this situation, it is the ability of computer scientists to strengthen the hands of the remaining professional reporters and engage new players in the watchdog process. Advances in analytic techniques, computing power, and the volume of digitally stored documents have prompted improvements in making sense of unstructured data. Much of the work to date has focused on the consumer arena: Web searches, blog discussions, tweets, and text messages that generate terabytes of information. Marketers, social scientists, information professionals, and governments have all invested heavily in innovative algorithms to analyze these sources. 12

key insights

;;; the public-interest journalism on which democracy depends is under enormous financial and technological pressure.

;;; computer scientists help journalists cope with these pressures by developing new interfaces, indexing algorithms, and data-extraction techniques.

;;; for public-interest journalism to thrive, computer scientists and journalists must work together, with each learning elements of the other’s trade.