A key question pondered by many presenters at the Computation + Journalism Symposium at Georgia Tech in Atlanta was trying to get at what the combination of those two concepts meant. Georgia Tech does not have a school of journalism, but invited speakers from many well-respected news organizations to weigh in about how they saw the future of those combined fields evolving.

Perhaps one of the most memorable aspects of the meeting was the fact that there were almost as many people live blogging the event as there were people in the room giving presentations. And, of course, the wall-sized whiteboards at the GVU Center at Georgia Tech. You would need a ladder to get your ideas up near the ceiling, but the point is, I think, when it comes to graphics and visualization ideas, bigger is much better. And 230 people from news organizations, Internet businesses and research groups nationwide showed up to talk big about what news is, who gets to select it, and whether or not machines are unbiased.

Two distinct points of view were represented with many stops in-between as participants explored the future of storytelling. Symposium organizer Professor Irfan Essa remarked, “A story can be a computational object as it starts to have different points of view.” There were journalists who talked about their craft as a “personal calling” juxtaposed against technology experts who promised that their news-media-information gathering mechanisms were automated “without human intervention.” There were also speakers who had developed hybrid systems that fell somewhere in the middle. Notably speakers from American Public Broadcasting had developed a technical-social model for reaching out to their audiences and making them part of the process of gathering and vetting news stories.

Krishna Bharat, Principal Scientist at Google and creator of Google News explained telling “stories” from the perspective of developing system algortihms for gathering and publishing thematic and on-demand news. He views Google News as a “birds eye view” of the Web that provides a “shuttle” to content that others write and publish. there are currently 41 editions of Google News in 18 languages. The Google News system presents news “clusters” gathered from the news items title, content snippet, source, timestamp, URL, and links to other perspectives. Bharat says, “Reading one article (about an event or topic) is like looking through one eye.”

Michael Skoler, Executive Director, Center for Innovation in Journalism at American Public Media talked with equal passion about the hands-on craft of building personal relationships as you build a story calling this, “public insight journalism.” He believes that the wired world has given news organizations many ways to loop citizens into the new gathering loop and to create a “partnership with the public” while gaining public trust.

Everyone seemed to agree that news and news organizations had changed dramatically as the Internet has become the place where most people get their news. The concept of breaking the news first has become a moot issue as bloggers and citizen reporters often make it to their blogs and Facebook site before you can say “news at seven.”

And speaking of news at seven, Nate Nichols a PhD student from Northwestern University is the creator of “News at Seven” system designed to “give you the news you want, the way you want it, each day.” Male and female animated characters read news, weather and entertainment segments in somewhat computerized-sounding voices. But hey, it’s a prototype and if I could design an avatar to tell me what I wanted to know every morning, I might subscribe.

More about the Computation + Journalism Symposium:

“Annenberg Online Journalism Review”
“upcoming”
“My Urban Report”