Hacking with Al Jazeera: Looking for that
creative spark
How hackathons can spur innovation in newsrooms
By Matthew Carroll, “Future of News” initiative at MIT Media Lab <@MattatMIT>
Media companies face difficult and thorny issues and, let’s face it, they’re desperate for answers.
Look at some of the obstacles: A struggle to gain traction in an era of social media and aggregation sites that have done a much better job of attracting readers by delivering the information they want and need. Audiences splintered into a thousand different directions.
Newsrooms are trying to sell their brands when the very identity of media companies has been blurred in the eyes of readers and viewers, who see news as a commodity.
So what’s a winning strategy? A lot of ideas have been tossed around. One suggestion is to place a much higher emphasis on innovation.
The idea is to turn newsrooms into centers of creativity, where reporters, developers, and designers work together to create new tools will help put news back on firmer footing — we’re talking about tools that help with storytelling, design, or with reporting.
Easier said than done, but some organizations are managing this trick quite nicely. Think Circa, BuzzFeed, and Vox. All are experimenting with new storytelling and design techniques that have helped them gain tremendous traction.
And some news sites have created mobile apps that do a good job — NYT Now, BBC, Al Jazeera have each taken a different mobile path, but all are interesting and well thought out.
But there is a broader question about how to intentionally spark innovation. Is it possible to bring together people to quickly create new tools that might have an impact on the world of news? A way to focus directed bursts of energy towards problems solving?
Maybe. One way might be through hackathons. Yes, those events where people create applications in a frenzy of tight deadlines fueled by gallons of Red Bull.
Al Jazeera, the broadcasting company, is among the companies and organizations that are experimenting with hackathons as a method for inspiring creativity on the fly.
The company hosted a media innovation hackathon from Nov. 29 to Dec. 1 in Doha, the capital of Qatar, the small natural gas-rich country in the Persian Gulf.
It was the inaugural kickoff for Canvas, which is what they call their new space for experimentation. They hope Canvas will bring together and nurture a thriving innovation community. Next year, they plan to hold two simultaneous hackathons, in Doha and San Francisco.
It was an impressive group. About 85 hackers from 37 countries were whittled down from an application pool of 1,600. They were developers, designers and journalists, or a mix. Participants, mentors for the participants, and judges were all flown to of Qatar at the expense of Al Jazeera. (Transparency alert: I was one of the judges.)
The goal was to create innovative, open source news apps or tools over about 48 hours. The theme was “Media in Context.”
For inspiration, the company laid out a roadmap with a dozen interesting challenges — for instance, “Mapping an understanding”, “Putting things back in context”, and “Discovering history and culture.”
In some ways it was what you would expect from a hackathon — participants working ridiculous hours and drinking thousands of cups of coffee at the ever-open cafe. People falling asleep at their computers because the physical exhaustion was compounded by massive jet lag. The intensity of the experience, like a crucible, hastened the development of a strong camaraderie between people who had no idea of each other’s existence only hours before.
In the end, the hackathon was a success by any measure — cool apps (or at least prototypes) were developed. A community (for at least a short time and hopefully longer) was formed around a shared experience. Nineteen projects were created.
That’s not always the case with hackathons. Sometimes it’s not a good experience. Sometimes it’s a massive fail. Bad hacks happen because they are poorly organized or without clear goals or objectives. The accommodations are bad, the food stinks, and team members hate each other’s ideas. Projects crash and burn. People leave after a weekend, thinking: I just wasted 48 hours for … what?
Not here. Organization was key. Al Jazeera partnered with Second Muse, a company that specializes in collaborative strategies. Morad Rayyan, who runs an innovation group for Al Jazeera, had a team that meshed well with a team led by Todd Khozein, a co-founder of Second Muse.
The event had it all. The space was a room at the Qatar National Convention Centre which was big enough to hold a large crowd, but did not feel overwhelming. Plenty of mentors were available to guide participants through everything from technical questions to practice demonstrations.
The work spaces were cleverly designed “cubicles”, which were nothing more than empty spaces defined by white bars. The design gave the illusion of some privacy but allowed easy intermingling. Each space had room for a small table that held about six people, the max allowed per team.
The facilitation was excellent. Instructions ranging from team forming to the lunch schedule were concise and understandable.
Al Jazeera provided $25,000 for prizes. Five major awards of $3,000 were given out. The awards corresponded to five themes — Most innovative; Greatest potential for use; Greatest impact on media, journalism, or technology; Highest technical or design quality; and Best embodiment of the values of Al Jazeera and the journalism profession.
Seven teams also won $1,000 prizes for work on topics from “Best personal context solution” to “Best historical/cultural context solution.”
It has always amazed me how small teams can come up with cool ideas and do a ton of work over two days. The teams didn’t disappoint me this time either, with either their creativity or the mountainous amounts of work they plowed through.
The winners included “Reporta”, which turns headlines into natural sounding conversations and “Perspectives,” which pulls up alternative versions of stories so you can see some very different approaches to the news you are reading.
So what was learned? Well, it’s clear innovative projects can be created quickly, given the right people, environment, and motivation. Hackathons, handled right, are good opportunities for newsrooms to unleash their creativity on hard problems.
What does it take to run a good hackathon? A huge part of the puzzle is strong organization. In this case, all the details of the event had been carefully thought out. Everything from how to organize teams to how to award prizes was spelled out carefully and clearly. And if improvisation was needed, it was done quickly and intelligently.
A big budget and cash prizes are nice, but not essential. This was a top-shelf event with decent cash prizes, but that doesn’t have to be the case. A good hackathon can involve a clear goal, a handful of people, a half day, and a budget that includes nothing more than pizza and coffee.
But be careful. Hackathons by themselves won’t solve a newsrooms problems. And they have some issues. The biggest arguably is that most projects are never fully completed. A hard-working team creates a clever prototype — then everyone has to go back to work, back to their regular lives. They don’t have time for followthrough.
The hack community, which reached a fever-pitch high in the last few tumultuous hours of coding before deadline, now has disbanded. Keeping some semblance of that community alive can be difficult.
Still, hackathons can help newsrooms. A hackathon doesn’t have to involve people from all over the world, or the region. It can be an internal hackathon, involving only employees, or maybe a few outsiders to add some diversity.
Helpful tools can be created by reporters, designers and developers working together. A major positive of an internal hack is that the people working on good projects have time later to finish, given the support of management.
At the very least, a well-run hack can provide a boost to workers, whose creative energies are unleashed. It’s can be a wonderful morale booster.
Can hackathons save journalism? Nope. It’s going to take a lot more than a handful of frenzied weekends to patch up the many problems newsrooms face. But they can be a piece of the future of news.
Matthew Carroll is a research scientist at the MIT Media Lab and runs the Future of News initiative there. He is a former reporter for the Boston Globe. He can be followed at: @MattatMIT. Blog posts on everything he writes can be found here.
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