New York Daily News

The Problem• We have a large body of data and reporting on a broad topic

• We want to translate it in a new way beyond stories and data viz

• How can readers have curation control, contact and interaction?

• How can we make it fun?

We focused on the hack theme of news as a conversation

The brainstorm & solution• We thought of “Her,” Siri, and even Microsoft’s “Clippy” in our brainstorm

• The Daily News has big success with live reader chats when people are providing direct

answers, but what might happen when it’s an API or custom data set chatting back?

• To find out, we made a tool that allows readers to chat TO OUR WEBSITE, so a “live chat”

becomes our user method of website and data navigation.• For the demo, pretend it’s Election Day 2012, but this flexible, reusable feature could become a

regular site tool for data-sharing

So along with the usual elements ...

We have these active features• The site talks to you first and offers help

• Users ask it election questions for immediate, user-driven data paths

• It types out answers (just like a gchat) via the API data

• As we add data over a period of time, the tool gets “smarter” and able to

answer a wider field of questions in finer detail

• Right now, you can ask things like:

Is Obama winning?/ Who’s running for Senate?

• To refine results, it might ask users things like:

What state do you live in?

• To keep things chatty and offer data the user might not think to ask, the

site will prompt readers with things like, “So let me ask YOU something.

What issue was most important to you when when cast your vote this

year?”

• Try it out HERE

See our simple design:

How it could integrate with the Daily News page

How it works: tech specs

The project is written primarily in Javascript, using associative arrays as the

main data structure, and leveraging the regular expressions to match

questions from the user. We used two main js libraries, highcharts and

jQuery to get information from the Reuters polling and elections API, as well

as individual data aggregation from the New York State Board of Elections.

Benefits user AND the newsroom

• The chat database would serve a central

hub to collect all the reporting collected over

a long news event - like a political campaign.

• Rather than scrambling to prepare last-

minute voter guides, reporters would have a

wealth of data already at their fingertips.

Try it for yourself ...

Click to talk to the

Daily News site