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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, specific events (elections) and opinion polls.

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GEN partnership with Reuters "Reuterswas official 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 fit 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 first 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 fits the New York Daily News specific market reaching a young and popular audience that could greatly benefit 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 identifies 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 first 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 difficult 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 find 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 findings 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 Huffington 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 findings that is not attractive to the readers and lacks relevance to their specific interests. To avoid this pitfall, most of the teams have relied on personalization and gamification. 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 beneficial. 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