#newsHACK II - the results are in
Matt Shearer
Innovation Manager
Pitch sessions in Dublin - photo by Youssef Sefiani
Last week, on Thursday and Friday, 22 hack teams gathered in Dublin and Glasgow for #newsHACK II a 2 day News Industry Hack Event. More details of this event are in my earlier #newsHACK post in April.
The event was a collaboration between BBC News Labs and The Global Editors Network, and (as with #newsHACK I in 2013) was produced and managed by the Connected Studio.
Dublin venue - photo by Youssef Sefiani
Who took part:
We had teams from these organisations SKY News, The Financial Times, Scottish Television (STV), BBC, The Times, YLE, Wall Street Journal, UCL, Storyful, Swansea University, University of West Scotland, NewsWhip, The Drum, Trinity College Dublin, Digital Enterprise Research Institute,Dublin City University, VBOT, Open Knowledge Ireland, Irish Independent, University of Westminster and University of Dundee.
Glasgow venue - photo by Basile Simon
What happened at the event: The Future of News Curation
The multidiscipline teams made up of Journalists, Developers and Designers brainstormed ideas to address the competition theme: The Future of News Curation.
They then built prototypes, or “hacks”, to demonstrate their ideas.
BBC News Labs provided a News Storyline curation tool and a collection of autotagged content from 38 news sources to help hackers build these prototypes; real content, contextualised with linked data tags, and curated Storylines, and exposed via APIs. Most of the participating teams used these APIs, along with other content and data sources.
The Prototypes were presented in a pitch session at the end of Friday 2nd May, which was linked live across the 2 venues using Stagebox (a BBC R&D product) so that the judges and participants from both venues could see all prototypes.
You can see a blow by blow account of #newsHACK II on the LiveBlog.
SKY NEWS team in Dublin - photo by Matt Shearer
The Winners:
1. Best in Show Dublin: “Know it all” by The Times
2. Best in Show Glasgow: “Blind Spot” by The Financial Times
3. Winner of “Connecting the News” Category: “Hash2News” by Hujo Insight (DERI)
4. Winner of “Explaining the News” Category: “Storyline Plus” by BBC Location Services, Travel News and News
5. Winner of “Theming the News” Category: “Mews App” by Sky News
6. Winner of “Tools for Journalists”: Irish Independent
7. Winner of “NewsCrack” award: “Bifid” by University of West Scotland
8. Winner of “Best Visually Inspired Hack” award: BBC News Archive App.
You can see all 22 of the prototype ideas listed here on HackerLeague.
The Judges:
● Robin Pembrooke, General Manager, BBC News, Weather & Travel
● Jim Chisholm – Chilsholm Publishing Consultancy
● Evangeline de Bourgoing – Programme Manager #EditorsLab
● Peter Rippon Editor, BBC Online Archive
● Johnny Ryan – Executive Director of UCD, innovation Academy
● Michael Satterthwaite – BBC News Labs tech advisor (Dublin)
● Iain Collins – BBC News Labs tech advisor (Glasgow)
Verbatims from participants since the event:
“Excellent event. Terrific challenge, great teams with exciting ideas. Organised very well with a top venue.”
“Access to play around with BBC Newslabs/Juicer APIs was useful part for me.”
“[The most useful part was] getting to understand the BBC and it's data, understanding the news better, and meeting new people.”
“[it was] very positive and now I know BBC has a lot of interesting tech we could make use of.”
Peter Rippon, one of the Judges, commented:
“It was exhilarating to see how fast ideas and skills are developing throughout the industry. You could really see the quality of thinking, and sophistication of what can be built, has developed hugely in just six months. I was also struck by how in terms of design, mobile first, then desktop has really taken root“.
Team working in Dublin - photo by Matt Shearer
What happens next:
1. The 2 winning “Best in Show” teams will be taking part in the Global Editors Network #EditorsLab final in Barcelona in June.
2. We will be looking at the ideas generated at the event by the BBC teams for working into product development.
3. BBC News Labs will be collaborating with interested teams on further linked data and News curation innovation.
4. BBC News Labs will be looking through technical feedback from participants, and will be improving our tools and APIs for future collaboration events.
You can follow BBC News Labs on Google+, Twitter and YouTube.
Matt Shearer is Innovation Manager, BBC News Labs
