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#Editors Lab
Reuters / The New York Times Hackdays
Maurice Tamman (Reuters) assisting the WNYC team
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Introduction

The Global Editors Network (GEN) is a community dedicated to media

innovation supported by 20,000+ media innovators. More than 2,500 of
those media innovators participate in GENs yearly programmes and
GENs annual conference called the GEN Summit. GEN represents the
leading media of the world and organises events bringing together the
best newsrooms and opinion leaders of the industry.
Reuters, the news and media division of Thomson Reuters, is one of the
worlds largest international multimedia news providers, reaching more
than one billion people every day. Reuters, in partnership with Ipsos,
have revolutionized the election polling process in order to deliver the
largest and most accurate polling information and election results.

The GEN Editors Lab Programme

The Editors Lab Hackdays is one of GENs key programmes in bringing
innovation to the newsroom. It is a worldwide series of Hackdays hosted
by the worlds leading news organisations such as The New York Times,
The Guardian, El Pas to name a few. The Editors Lab brings together
developers, journalists and designers from the Global Editors Network
representing the best newsrooms from the city where it is being held.
During two days, teams build news prototypes around a theme linked to
the latest trends in media innovation. After two intense working days,
teams present their projects in front of a jury who give their verdict after
the presentations. The climax of the season is the crowning of the
overall Editors Lab Final Winner which gathers each national Editors Lab
Winner at the GEN Summit.

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Reuters / The New York Times Hackdays

Dates and Location

The Hackdays took place on March 29th - 30th at The New York
Times Headquarters.

The Teams
Nine news organizations entered teams consisting of a journalist, a
developer and a designer in this two-day competition. Teams
included: BBC, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, New York Daily
News, WNYC, Narratively, Columbia University, CUNY University.

The Jury
- Danny Schechter, Emmy-Award winning producer, founder of
mediachannel.org
- David Stolarsky, developer at The New York Times
- Evangline de Bourgoing, Programme Manager at Global Editors
Network

The Theme
The theme of these Hackdays was News as a conversation:
Exploring innovating methods to discover and visualize stories buried
in news-related data that engage audiences, invite user interactions
and encourage collaboration across the newsroom. Think breaking
news, specic events (elections) and opinion polls.

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GEN partnership with Reuters
Reuters was ofcial partner for the GEN Editors Lab Hackdays at The
New York Times and brought invaluable knowledge and hands-on
coaching for all the participating teams for the Hackdays. As the
worlds largest international news agency providing real-time, award-
winning multimedia news content, Reuters was a natural t to partner
with GEN as we drive newsroom innovation together.
Reuters opened access to their API 'Polling Explorer'. The
explorer, http://polling.reuters.com/, displays the opinions of hundreds
of thousands of Americans on a multitude of topics. All surveys are
conducted online using a pool of pre-screened participants. The data
available was:
- 2012 exit polling results
- 2012 election results for presidential elections
- 2012-2013 polling data on all topics from politics to lifestyle

On the rst morning of the event, a masterclass was given by :

- Maryanne Muray, Global Head of Graphics at Reuters
- Charlie Szymanski, Interactive Data Designer at Reuters
- Maurice Tamman, Editor-in-charge of Data and Computational
Journalism at Reuters
After explaining the background of the Polling and Elections projects,
they gave the participants instructions on how to access and work
with the Reuters API. They also showed some graphics and
visualizations created using the polling data and informed the
participants about the development work that went into building
polling widget/API.

A Reuters team stayed in the venue during the whole event to help
the teams innovate with the API.

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Teams at work

The winning project

The New York Daily News team won the Editors Lab with their
project NewsQs. NewsQs is a tool that lets readers interact with
New York Daily News in a whole new way. News Qs allows the
readers have a live chat with the New York Daily News website as if
they were talking to a human.
According to the team, We have data and reporting. As a newsroom
we make decisions on how to present it, but we want to let our
readers talk to us about what they want so they have curation control,
contact and interaction. We embraced the hack theme of news as a
conversation. Our idea is to let readers literally converse with our
website turning the concept of a live chat into a method of site
navigation.'

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The users type a question on the homepage (for example, 'who won
the election in my district?'), and the website answers it directly and
provides links for more information. The team joked about getting
some inspiration from Clippy, the Microsoft Word help tool.

NewsQs project stemmed from the successful live reader chats the
New York Daily News has hosted on their website with celebrities. But
the tool can be used in many different ways. It could be used not only
to cover elections but also live events such as sports events or
awards ceremonies.

On the technical side, the team explained that 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.

The jury was impressed by the versatility of this tool and its user-
friendly interface. They appreciated how well NewsQs ts the New
York Daily News specic market reaching a young and popular
audience that could greatly benet from this simple, direct and quick
way to access information.

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The honorable mentions

The Guardian was awarded an honorable mention by the jury and

won the prize given by Reuters and the audiences award.
The team created Pollie, an interface for exploring polling data. When
using Pollie, the users start by logging in with Facebook. Then they
are asked questions such as : When you think about the rights of
same-sex couples, which of the following comes closest to your
personal opinion? and they have to choose between four answers.
First, their answers are compared with the exit polls answers.
Secondly, Pollie identies a couple of the users Facebook friends that
are most likely to have extreme and opposing views on the question,
based on how respondents demographically similar to them
answered the survey. According to the team, the presentation of
polling data is often too complex and not relatable. But Pollie allows
readers to interact with poll results in a personalized and
conversational manner. It asks the reader for information about
themselves and their friends and uses that to guide them through a
tailored view of the data. We believe Pollie makes data more
accessible, and can be adapted for use with any any poll.

The team used a Javascript library (Ractive.js) to build Pollie. From

Facebook, they pulled demographic information about the users and
their Facebook friends. From Reuters, they gathered exit poll answers
to questions nationally and for each demographic set. There are two
versions of Pollie. In the rst one, the users click their answers. In the
second one, thanks to Speech recognition, the users can talk
directly to Pollie. The team used Speech recognition to create a new
experience and to increase accessibility for people with disabilities.
According to the team, in the long run it would also be ideal to create
an interface where newsroom editors can easily select the questions
and polling data to be used in their Pollie project.

The Jury was impressed by the way Pollie transformed data

exploration into a truly entertaining experience. The jury members
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also praised the neat interface of the project and the technical level it
displayed.

Narratively built Stac, a tool that allows the readers to select

information from an article and easily create with this information a
striking infographic and then share it on social media. According to
the team, important news is often bursting with numbersbig,
boring, daunting numbers. As a result, data-heavy stories are often
hard to get through and even harder to share. With Stac, publishers
and readers now have an easy and engaging way to create eye-
popping and highly shareable and personalized infographics directly
from an article. And consumers have a quick and exciting way to
digest the news. Facebook and Twitter give the opportunity to their
users to share articles in a rather impersonal way. But Stac give them
the opportunity to add their own personal twist.

The jury gave an honorable mention to Narratively. It praised this

project as a smart and innovative way to encourage article-sharing
and reading and appreciated its sleek interface.

To view all the innovative projects from the participants, see here.

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The Jury with the BBC team

Lessons learned

This competition demonstrated the versatility and potential of the

Reuters Polling API. The teams have used it in very innovative and
diverse ways and have avoided the usual pitfalls encountered when
presenting polling data.

Exploring the data

Polling results are dense and difcult to read. Interesting detailed
data is buried in polling results. But when looking at the polls results,
the readers do not have access to it because they do not have
neither the time nor the data literacy to discover it. Reading articles
about the polls do not help them nd out this detailed data, as most
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of them focus only on top-line numbers. During election season,
journalists are bombarded with data from polls and tend to
concentrate on the most obvious ndings and overlook the wealth of
data buried in exit polls.
At the Editors Lab, the teams have attempted to tackle this problem
by building innovative exploring features that lets the users make the
most of the incredible richness of the API. They have explored the
data in two different ways. BBC and The Hufngton Post have invited
their users to guess the opinions of a certain demographic group,
whereas WNYC and CUNY university encourage their reader to
identify demographic groups based on their opinions.

Interacting with the data

The challenge was to engage the readers with the data. When
presenting polling results, journalists tend to give a neutral and
general overview of the key ndings that is not attractive to the
readers and lacks relevance to their specic interests. To avoid this
pitfall, most of the teams have relied on personalization and
gamication.
The Guardian provided the best example of polling datas
personalisation. It achieved to turn the data exploration into a truly
personal experience by connecting the polling data with the readers
personal Facebook data. This team managed to create a real bridge
between the polling results and the personal sphere of the users.
Most of the teams have built games in an attempt to transform the
exploration of the polls results into an entertaining experience. Teams
such as The Guardian or WNYC seemed to have created the best
news-gaming experience because they succeeded in balancing
information density with a sleek and a playful design.

Contextualising the polls results

Polling results and news articles are mutually benecial. Polling
results can serve as an entry point to news articles and news articles
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are essential to make the most of polling results. After giving the
answer to each question of its quiz, The Wall Street Journal invited the
players to read an article about the issue tackled in the question
before coming back to the game. By adding some context to their
reporting of the results, they helped their users make sense of the
data together with increasing the stickiness of their website. The New
York Daily News uses a similar way to transform the polling results in
a gateway for more news.

Predicting elections and narrativizing the data

There are other ways in which this API could be used in the future :
Predicting elections and narrativizing the data.
Reuters API could provide a great resource to build prediction
models for future elections. The timeframe of the event was probably
too short to allow them to create a statistical model sophisticated
enough to predict the results. But the Reuters polling API with
updated results could be a perfect tool to create results predictions
in the same way that Nate Silver did in FiveThirtyEight.
Following the theme of the competition: News as a conversation, the
teams focused on building interactive features but did not explore
how polling results could be integrated into a storytelling experience.
However this could be a very promising way to make the most of the
Reuters Polling API.

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Event Stats

Twitter
Tweets with #EditorsLab : 511
Mentions, RT and favorites: 156

Slideshare
Winning project : 643 views
Narratively project : 2159 views
All the projects : 4387 views

Scribble Live
Unique users : 371
Average time on the page : 35 min 10s
Total engagement time : 24 081 min.

Reaction to Hackdays

Reuters Inside Agency: Reuters and Global Editors Network present
The New York Times Hackdays (March 25, 2013)
New York Daily News: Daily News digital team wins Editors Lab
hackathon (republished by New York News) (March 30, 2014)
GEN Website: NewsQ: Talk to your Website (April 3, 2014)
Reuters Inside Agency: Hackday Insights: Q&A with Lauren
Johnston and Kristen Lee, NY Daily News (April 23, 2014)
Reuters Inside Agency: Hackday Insights: Q&A with Kenan Davis,
The Guardian (April 24, 2014)
Reuters Inside Agency: Hackday Insights: Q&A with Noah
Rosenberg, Narratively (April 24, 2014)

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Contact

Follow Reuters News Agency on Twitter @ReutersAgency

Follow GEN on Twitter @GENinnovate
See more pictures from the Event on Flickr

To contact Reuters and learn more about their Polling API:

Mike Woods, Director of Marketing, Market Development at Reuters
News Agency,
mike.woods@thomsonreuters.com
More about Reuters Polling API : http://polling.reuters.com

To sponsor, host or participate in Hackdays:

Colm Curneen, Deputy Director,
ccurneen@globaleditorsnetwork.org, +33153012441

Evangeline de Bourgoing, Programme Manager,

edebourgoing@globaleditorsnetwork.org, +33153012161

More about the Global Editors Network:

www.globaleditorsnetwork.org