Interhacktives Build the News

Here we are: the presentations and results. Watch our live blog for updates!

We're now in the final two hours before we have to stop building and present our concept, Hotspot. Crunch time is officially here. 

We're focusing now on finishing up our photoshop comment threads, getting our demo working and finalising the Keynote presentation. We'll have to give a 5 minute presentation that will involve 3 minutes of us talking and 2 minutes of Q&A, and we've been particularly thinking about the latter and the questions that might be asked. How is it different from other integrated comment systems? What might be the future potential of the project? 

Perhaps it's because we're near the end or had too much caffeine, but the hard work hasn't stopped both City teams from engaging in some Twitter-based silliness. Couple of the best:

#buildthenews #buildtheshoes pic.twitter.com/hobedb3bvH

— Hamza Ali (@Hamza_M_Ali)

October 19, 2014

Team #Interhacktives at #BuildTheNews - and the best photobomb ever by @Hamza_M_Ali http://t.co/WkvpPE2tIw pic.twitter.com/Io29Xh3D7E

— Ashley Kirk (@AshleyKirk92)

October 19, 2014

Part of the fun I suppose? 

We're going to be trying out a live blog from 3.30pm onwards to cover the presentations, so tune in then for more!

Build the News Day 2: More building.

Team Interhacktives are feeling a bit weary after day 1 and an evening of complimentary food and drink provided by The Times. We are still making good progress with Hotspot as we approach the presentations. Rumour has it Ashley is getting a bit fed up with photoshop though...

Stage 3: Build

Team Interhacktives are busy building Hotspot, in code and on photoshop. 

We also may have opened our third packet of Haribo...

Enough planning - the time had come for our sense check. This was where we pitched our idea to the Times staff for feedback with the knowledge that it could get torn apart and we'd back at Stage 1. Nerve-wracking stuff. 

We filed into the indoor greenhouse with our flip chart and Ashley gave a two minute speech explaining Hotspot. Interestingly, our feedback was centred around a major debate that we'd been having in our group amongst ourselves. A central feature of our idea had involved a comment interface which the reader had to swipe to see that would reveal all the commented areas, highlighted in different colours arranged in a traffic light system (red for most popular sentences, followed by amber, and then yellow). To see general comments, the reader would then have to swipe again. 

But would that be too many swipes? We had wondered, and seems like the Times team did too. As a result, we've got rid of both interfaces, so we are just focusing on hotspots. The team is now working on altering what we were already producing to suit our new idea. 

Now Stage 3 begins: Build. 

Look out for our vlog detailing our progress!

So here we are at the Impact Hub Westminster with coffee and haribo at the ready. 

The first stage of planning our concept, named Hotspot, is well underway. For the moment, we've moved away from our computers to sketch out basic design and features on paper so that we all have a united sense of what Hotspot will look like and what it will include. 

As Clara mentioned in her first blogpost, we're focusing on the comments and actions category, essentially try to work out a way to make commenting on a mobile app more interactive and more integrated. To us, it seems a bit counter-intuitive to just lump a comment section on the bottom of an article. How can a reader be encouraged to participate if it's so out of the way and difficult to find? 

We want to find a way to allow readers to comment on specific areas of an article, and alert them from the very beginning to ongoing and popular discussions. The comment 'hotspots', so to speak. 

Stay tuned as we move into Stage 2: Sense Checking.

What’s this? #Interhacktives building the news again?

We’re Rebecca, Clara, Ashley and Emily, a merry band of Interactive Journalism students and would-be hackers from City University who’ll be forsaking sleep and sanity (?) this weekend to participate in the second ever Build The News hackathon.

Last year’s interactive students created this blog when they went to the first Build The News, and so we’ll be continuing this fine tradition.

Build The News is a weekend event organised by The Times where student journalists and developers from across the UK compete to create the best journalistic innovation. The overarching theme for this weekend is “mobile” – an area where the rapid transition away from desktop still seems to have taken many news sites by surprise. How do we handle this?

We’re participating in the “comment” category, where our goal is to find a way of better integrating comments into news articles. How can we bring readers’ discussions to the forefront? How do we deal with noise and trolling on comment sections? This is some of what we’ll be trying to answer over the coming days.

Expect thoughts on concept development, vlog updates from the event, and very possibly some caffeine highs to come.

An important part of any journalistic innovation is considering how it is going to benefit you in financial terms. It's all very well making something look smashing but it has to make 'business sense' as well.

This is an engagement funnel. It represents the activity of a reader on any given article with the majority of readers (subscribers) at the top of the funnel simply reading the article. The number of readers that then engage further with the article by rating comments or commenting publicly on the article themselves is far less than the number of people who simply read the article and bounce straight out again.

As a producer of content you want your readers engage with your stuff as much as possible. This is important if you run an advertising based business model because your content becomes more valuable to advertisers when people spend a longer time reading a page. It is also important from a subscription-based perspective because the more a subscriber comments and gets involved in the community of the publication, the more likely it is that they will then go on to re-subscribe.

Our Build the News project seeks to make this engagement funnel shorter and wider by allowing readers to recommend and annotate an article privately or semi-publicly. We believe that people will be more willing to comment on an article if they can determine who sees their comments. In this way the number of people who become involved will increase and result in more people returning or re-subscribing to your site.

With this system in place we think the engagement funnel will look more like this.

After a couple of hard days of deliberations, plenty of changes in our approach, our planning and even in the core idea, we are almost there. 

Here's the main outline our idea, which is in the 'tactile' category of the Build the News competition. 

Using desktop, tablet and mobile, we want to emulate the way in which families and friends share print articles around the breakfast table on a Sunday morning.

Circles, recommendations and annotations

Essentially, within the website a user would be able to create Google+ style circles of individuals they would want to share articles with. These could be, for example, “family”, “colleagues”, “close friends”, or even just another individual. A user could create as many circles as they wanted, and each circle could have any number of people in it.

On each article there would be an option to “recommend”. This is like a share, but it is meant to be more personal, and would be directed at specific circles or individuals, rather than everyone that a user is connected with on a social media platform.

As well as being able to recommend the article, the user would be able to incorporate annotations intended just for the individual or group of individuals receiving the recommendation, such as “mum and dad, I thought you would find this paragraph really interesting”. Each annotation would be max 400 characters, to avoid reading them becoming a task.

Once the user has added all the annotations they want, they would click “save and recommend”, which would generate a unique URL making the annotations visible only to the recipients. A search tool, similar to that on Facebook, would allow the user to find their intended circles or individual recommendees by typing in the name of the circle/individual.

In terms of how the recipients would be notified of the recommendation/annotations, there would be three possible options. In each case, the clickable, unique URL would be included:

- “Notify via email”: the recipient(s) would receive an email notification at the address associated with their account.

- “Notify via Facebook”: the recipient(s) would receive an Facebook notification. This would only be possible if the recipient(s) have Facebook accounts associated with their account.

- “Notify via Twitter”: this is for those who want their annotations to be more open to the general public. They would tweet the link at specific individual(s), but the openness of Twitter means that anyone could click on the link if they see the tweet.

As excitement ran high, we came up with this awesome idea of a Sunday paper (tablet-first) app that would deliver content tailored to your lazy needs and emulate Sunday newspaper sharing by members of a family sitting at a table.

It was meant to classify news stories and features in four categories:

1) Recommendations by the Sunday Times based on  what you read during the week

2) “Save for Sunday” articles you decided to skip during the week and come back to on Sunday

3) Recommendations by the members of your network (family, friends, fellow subscribers) 4) “Silly Sunday” - a choice of randomly selected stories should you feel whimsical and tired of the other three.

It was meant to look like that:

And we loved it.

As the pitching hour struck, we rustled the papers and presented the idea to the panel of judges.  

And they loved it, too. Kind of. “Narrow down the scope of the idea” was their best advice. “Oh, and focus on the annotations, no one has yet come up with a good way of inserting in-line comments.” And for a reason, we thought. Slightly defeated, we came back to the table to reconsider our plans. After all, annotation were just a fun bit of our bigger project. We felt stuck.

As with everything in journalism - and life if we want to get all philosophical - plans change. So did ours. In the days prior to Build The News, we focused on designing a campaign platform and centred it around a potential campaign on public health and in particular high levels of sugar intake. We even had the snazzy title 'When sugar doesn't taste so sweet', courtesy of Patrick in one of our many moments of inspiration. 

Come the day of the event however, the realisation that improving the many existing campaign platforms was not as appealing as trying something totally new. So we decided to try our hand at the 'tactile' category, tasked with reinventing the Sunday paper. Certainly no easy assignment, but certainly a fascinating one. 

Here's the brief:

Sunday papers have traditionally provided a hefty amount of writing and journalism for those who want to sit down and absorb the week in news. Colour supplements, a news review, interviews, high quality photography and more are put into a distinct package at the end of the week and normally make those who buy them groan under the weight of carrying them home from the newsagent.

But now the idea of buying Sunday paper may feel quaint. Circulation is down year on year across all Sunday titles, and news consumption on the web seems to have moved to a model where the homepage is becoming irrelevant.

In this kind of climate, how does the Sunday paper stay relevant? Is there room for more edition-based apps that seek to emulate the traditional Sunday morning reading experience or does everything need to change?

Bright and early on Saturday morning, stocked up on more free coffee and pastries than we could handle, we started brainstorming. 

So, a few of us from the Interactive Journalism MA course at City University London took on the rather ambitious-sounding challenge of trying to 'build the news'. For a bit of background click here, but essentially build the news is a weekend event where student journalists from different UK universities get the chance to team up with web developers/designers and compete with others in order to produce the best digital journalism project. The two-day event organised by News UK is taking place this weekend and we will be using this blog to detail our experience, present our thoughts and ideas, with a bit of silliness mixed in as well.