ITV News marks a paradigm shift in online journalism

I've been privileged to spend the last few months programme managing the relaunch of ITV News. The site went live yesterday, to a lively and predictably mixed reaction on Twitter. I say "predictably mixed", as the site is taking some radical steps that were always likely to upset some. But they come as a significant step forward in a direction of travel - towards real time online news - that's been clear for some time.  

The design and build were carried out by Made by Many, who have posted their own analysis of the approach, focusing on the central question: "What would news be like if we had networked digital media (and digital cameras and phones and laptops) but there had never been newspapers or broadcast TV news programmes?" The answer mashes up some of what users have become used to on Twitter, Tumblr and other blog patforms with some of the toolkit of the traditional news website (articles arranged in categories).

In so doing, ITV has turned on its head the current hybrid model exemplified by the likes of The Guardian, which I'd summarise as an approach based on articles grouped into categories, where some articles are live blogs. Instead, the very structure of ITV News is driven by the live blog model, with articles nested inside a stream alongside updates in a range of other formats (text, tweets, images, video, external links), freeing the blog to be a blog and articles to be articles. To dig further, the stream can be filtered, and tags and categories enable users to catch up with specific subjects.

We've followed the Agile philosophy in developing the site, which means a lot of discipline has been needed in judging the Minimum Viable Product to launch with. Expect to see more features in the future from the brilliant team at ITV. For now, we're simply proud of our role in helping establish them as a player to be reckoned with in online journalism.

Using linked data to build context around news

In a post a few weeks ago on the excellent R4isStatic, the BBC's Paul Rissen outlined an inspiring vision of how news could be enhanced by embracing the possibilities of the web as a medium. Hold on, I hear you cry, surely news has been there, done that and is now hurrying off behind a paywall again? Hasn't the web transformed the way organisations distribute news, people consume it and even, through social media, the way that news is gathered in the first place? Well, yes, yes and yes - but.

Paul makes the point that while the inputs and the outputs might have changed, the product itself remains remarkably similar. A story appears, without context, designed to simplify and dramatise a set of issues enough that readers, viewers or listeners will be quickly satisfied. Paul outlines how a data-driven, semantic approach to news might situate it in a wider and more meaningful context, drawing out the latent power of the web to deepen and enrich our understanding. (In so doing he has some trenchant observations to make about how it's the conservatism of journalists rather than new technology that's responsible for our supposedly shrinking attention spans.) I urge you to read the whole post and subscribe to the blog.

And I mention it now because yesterday the Guardian announced that its Open Platform Content API will allow users to query its data by MusicBrainz IDs and ISBN numbers. (I have to declare an interest; having overseen the BBC's adoption of MusicBrainz IDs as Interactive Editor for Music, I'm delighted to see another major content player take them up. Like any other standards, open data standards like MusicBrainz stand or fall by their spread and adoption.)

It's worth pointing out that this is essentially a developer-facing initiative, as a glance at the FAQs will make clear. So what's the connection with Paul Rissen's vision of a linked-data-driven news? One objection to that vision is that there is already plenty of context provided by the manual linking and proprietary tagging carried out by journalists now. And the Guardian's link-up with MusicBrainz and ISBN numbers doesn't immediately change the content or links on their own pages, which usually provide a great deal of context, again manually, in particular in the music area.

But the context that exists now rarely transcends the format of a point-to-point link or index page, and is very largely contained within originating organisations, limiting its scope really to change or broaden readers' understanding of concepts involved.

What the Guardian has done will start to enable third parties to build automatically on the context provided by their stories and the metadata around them; and (in theory at least) vice versa, pointing the way towards a much more integrated web of information around topics that might fundamentally change the experience and expectations of news consumers. And (again in theory at least), context could move beyond point-to-point links and begin to model visualisations of the information around concepts like, say, artists or books. (We did this very thing at the BBC - albeit in a very rudimentary way - around the concept of the play count for artists).

Of course this all raises a whole set of questions about business models. Paywalls represent a fundamental challenge to the viability of building open data around news (and vice versa). And thoughts about revenue models around linked open data are in their infancy. So it's a good job our own Simon is in a position where he can move some of these conversations on.

A Data Journalism Meetup in Berlin

Sarah and I are currently working in Berlin, at least until early September, and as luck would have it, the Web of Data Meetup group held their third meet up group here, in Fjord's rather lovely German HQ, right by Checkpoint Charlie, as it happens (making this our only venture into the former West Berlin on the trip so far, if only by metres).

Not having acquainted ourselves with the full schedule, we'd anticipated perhaps two or three presentations and a bit of informal networking. Not a bit of it. Rather, the seven-hour-plus afternoon and evening session was tightly run, intelligently programmed and both enlightening and engaging. While being detailed enough to be meaningful it somehow remained sufficiently service-/strategy-/product-focussed to by graspable by the non-engineers in the room – about half of us it turned out.

Billed Data Journalism, the workshop looked at a range of issues which arise from the uses (and possible misuses) of data and metadata in contemporary journalism – in its print, broadcast and online guises – and asked what fundamental changes are affecting the industry as a result.

Jonathan Gray of the Open Knowledge Foundation set the scene at the afternoon's opening, making clear the degree to which government and business the world over was opening up its records, and pointing to the vast opportunities this opens for journalists and campaigners.

Tom Scott from the BBC talked about the thinking behind and build process behind the fabulous BBC Wildlife Finder, and how it used broadcast metadata to aggregate video clips around various genres of biology, from animal type to ecozone. He pointed out something which emerged over and over during the afternoon – that smart use of data and tagging allowed the dynamic creation and aggregation of content which, done "by hand" would be financially and logistically untenable. He had one of the great lines of the afternoon, too: "People care about things, not web pages." Quite.

Deutsche Presse Agentur's Gerd Kamp then took us more directly into the world of journalism, discussing DPA's use of data in everything from scoping stories regionally (hugely important when syndicating stories to local news outlets) to creating dynamically-generated infographics and maps. Gerd made the astute observation that many of the CMSs used by journalists already included metadata tagging functionality but that too few journalists were incentivised to use them.

More from the BBC: Silver Oliver and Jem Rayfield from BBC News talked about the broadcaster's online coverage of the World Cup, taking us through, respectively, the IA and data approaches necessary to disaggregate content from its usual "linear" context and instead present it around rather meaningful, dynamically-created pages (over 800 of them, by the end of the tournament.)

The Guardian's information architect Martin Belam gave a funny and thought-provoking overview of the online newspaper's use of data in the creation of stories and campaigns, looking in some detail at the way The Guardian has been able to use crowd-sourcing collaborations with its readers to sift through otherwise unwieldy – and hence pretty much useless – data sets. Martin has blogged about the day, too.

Political scientist Ole Wintermann of The Bertelsmann Foundation's Future Challenges sounded a slightly cautionary note among the enthusiasm. It's all well and good the media – and hence both the public and civil society in general – having access to unprecedented amounts of data, but inferring causal meaning from data, be it about, climate or demographics, remained a huge challenge. In a moment somewhat reminiscent of Neville Brodie's recent appearance on Newsnight, he was especially scathing about the reliance of journalists and policy makers on infographics to communicate ideas without really examining substance – especially substance in terms of causality. Sarah and I both felt it was one of the most adroit interventions of the afternoon (and I'll have more to say on the matter in post in the near future).

The presentations ended with the University of Btitish Columbia's Eric Ulken talking about his former employer, the LA Times' use of data. Not passing up a golden opportunity to foment a slightly stroppy discussion he talked us through, let's say, somewhat controversial use of data by the paper: its publication of teacher performances in the city. It certainly raised the room's temperature, and rightly so. Responsibility and caution need to applied in data journalism as much as in the venerable profession's other guises – and arguably more so.

So a thoroughly enjoyable, stimulating and, yes, rather tiring day. Our thanks to Georgi Kobilarov of linked data specialists Uberblic Labs for organising it all.