Knight Mozilla News Tech Partnership

Seven Topics we want to discuss at the1st Innovation ChallengeSascha Venohr / Editor ZEIT ONLINE

Seven topics we look at

• Re-think the experience of online comments & online debate

• The news applications of tomorrow, using HTML5 web applications

• New Tools for people with limited technical skills to create meaningful visualizations of complex data

• The news storytelling potential for HTML5 video

• Prototype for cross-platform news delivery that only requires the open web to work

• A mash-up that combines the relevance of breaking news with the importance of in-depth coverage

• New ways to aggregate first-hand reports & re-define the term "crowd-sourced reporting." 

Re-think the experience of online comments & online debate

Online discussion threads have been part of the Internet experience since the late 1990s.

The form of user commentary has stayed fairly static, often relegated to sit far "below the fold" at the end of the news story.

Re-think the experience of online comments & online debate

New capabilities in the browser, like HTML5 canvas and video, provide an opportunity to completely re-think the relationship between news users, and news producers.

Meanwhile, emerging standards like OStatus, Webfinger, and Salmon are making it possible to re-imagine the relationship between people who comment, and the sites they comment on.

Users should be able to annotate and deeplinks sections in Articles

The news applications of tomorrow, using HTML5 web applications as your canvas

• News applications today are often confined to a single web site, or web page. They are often embedded within a story, and are not able to take on a life of their own as stand-alone applications.

• HTML5 presents an opportunity for a news application to live many lives at once:

- embedded in a story

- running on a mobile device or tablet

- as a layer within a broader browsing experience.

Make it easier for people with limited technical skills to create meaningful visualizations of complex data

• Newsrooms around the world are experimenting with data visualizations to make more information accessible to larger number of news users.

• Successful visualizations often require specialized skills to create.

Make it easier for people with limited technical skills to create meaningful visualizations of complex data

• Many journalists have a keen sense about the story hidden within the data, and the storytelling experience to know how to best present that information to readers.

• Tools are starting to emerge, but there is a lot more to be done.

• Consider the steps that would be required to go from a complex dataset to a putting meaninful visual representation of that data online. How can this process be made easier?

The news storytelling potential for HTML5 video

HTML5 and open video makes it possible to pull data from across the web into a story, and for information related to the video to literally pop onto the page.

The news storytelling potential for HTML5 video

• Video is becoming a larger part of people's daily news experience, but the current offerings are largely passive and offer little in the way of context as viewers watch.

• The challenge is creating practical and compelling demonstrations of what HTML5 and open video make possible for news stories.

• What creative storytelling approaches does this open up for news organizations? In particular, how might you tell a story by pulling in video, data and other material from across the web?

Prototype for cross-platform news delivery that only requires the open web to work

People are reading news on a growing number of screens. Mobile devices and other new devices are becoming more powerful.

Prototype for cross-platform news delivery that only requires the open web to work

• Mobile operating systems are not converging, but mobile browsers are moving toward one set of standards.

• Opportunity for the open web to solve the cross-platform challenge for news organizations.

• Websites can adapt to the device it's shown on using only the web browser and the capabilities therein.

• Taking advantage of new functionality like geo-location and offline storage

• How could this cross-platform delivery be made easier for news organizations

Build a mash-up that combines the relevance of breaking news with the importance of in-depth coverage

The web has enabled breaking-news coverage like we have not experienced before.

Build a mash-up that combines the relevance of breaking news with the importance of in-depth coverage

• At the same time, real-time coverage eventually becomes a vast sea of information - original content, curated content, user generated submissions, text, audio, video, and more - as an event unfolds over days, weeks, months, or years.

• The open web presents a new opportunity for a "unit of news" that is both open-ended and still able to provide the necessary background to help news users understand the larger narrative.

Aggregating first-hand reports & re-define the term "crowd-sourced

reporting." • During the aftermath of events like the recent earthquake in

Japan, aggregating first-hand accounts of the situation on the ground is critical.

• Once international media attention has subsided, investigations become increasingly challenging.

• In these situations, gathering data from a network of citizen sources can make all the difference. This is true for any investigative story.

• Have a look at the work being done by organizations like ProPublica and the Public Insight Network, and tools like Assignment Desk - all with the aim of involving news users in the news production process. Meanwhile, projects like The Ushahidi Platform and ThinkUp aim to empower people to easily report information from anywhere. How can the open web be used to package these tools so they can be easily used by reporters?

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Thank you for your attention.

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