8 prototypes to report sports news in innovative ways
On 25–26 November 2016, the Global Editors (GEN) and FuJo (the Institute for Future Media & Journalism at Dublin City University), with the support of the Google News Lab, hosted top newsrooms from Ireland and the UK in Dublin for an Editors Lab focused on developing new sports journalism prototypes.
From live blogging to user-generated content, eight teams of “news-hackers” gathered to develop and present new tools for newsrooms invested in exploring the potential for innovation in sports reporting.
Sports news audiences are passionate but they present interesting challenges to journalists: How can they turn that passion into dynamic and innovative sports coverage within such a competitive area? Journalists have to be able to respond to trends and opportunities in sports media technology, but how to take on this endeavour?
Could sports journalism become a testing ground to drive innovation in other types of news coverage?
With the new abundance of sports data, it seems the obvious feature for newsrooms to leverage to develop new storytelling formats. But it also challenges perspectives on the integration and choice of visuals and immersive storytelling to be developed for sports coverage. The jury noticed and commented on the potential applications for of the tools created in Dublin for political reporting.
The challenge of this hackathon is for participants — journalists, developers and designers — to find new ways to respond to trends and opportunities in sports media technology, leveraging the abundance of sports data and incorporating visual and immersive storytelling to sports coverage.
Two guest speakers were on hand to help inspire the teams and give them useful tips for prototyping. Malcolm Coles from the Telegraph gave us a detailed tour of their tool the Roboblogger, the system they are building to create and publish in real time for football live blogs, rich graphic visualisations of match insight and action.
Google News Lab’s representative Matt Cooke followed up, highlighting a few tools and their interests for the teams in the room, for building their prototypes or to start using within their newsrooms: Google Trends, the data visualisation tool from the Google News Lab; Google My Maps a tool for custom web map sharing and its many uses for reporting; and Google Earth the virtual globe, map and geographical information program and its relevance for sports journalism and engaging reporting.
After an intense first day bouncing ideas off each other, getting mentorship from Jane Suiter from FuJo and GEN’s Sarah Toporoff and a first sprint the teams from Dublin City University, The Times, RTE, the Irish Independent, Trinity Mirror, BBC Visual Journalism, NewsWhip and The Journal.ie explained their ideas in 1 minute mini-pitches, all set for building and perfecting their prototypes the following day.
Here are the projects (you can also check them out here)
Dublin City University
“Visualisation of Rally Results” is an app that allows the visualisation of timing/results within Irish rallying” It is a way in which audiences can participate in an interactive tool to see the time differences between two drivers over a single stage or a full event. It allows for additional information such as bios, car details, and previous results of drivers. It also gives a stage profile to add another graphic to see how that affected time.—link
NewsWhip
“Fixture” is a real time social analytics for sports publishers.” Fixture is an analytics tool that shows newsrooms how their social impact around sporting events stacks up against their competitors’ in real time.—link
The Times
“Enhance” is a tool aimed at enhancing articles for readers depending on their knowledge of a sport. Different readers have different requirements, with this tool they get different experiences and levels of reporting and information when they read the story.—link
Irish Independent
The Local Game is a cost-effective, one-stop shop for all real-time scores, results and tables for amateur football in Ireland with a strong emphasis on user generated content.—link
RTÉ
“Teamder” is a browser-based software toy intended to add interest to following International Football on RTÉ services while also attempting to improve social media engagement and engagement with a younger audience (18–25).—link
The Journal.ie
“The 42 Player Ratings” is a new way of presenting ratings, inviting readers to rate players and use this data to track players’ performance over a season. The Journal.ie’s player ratings app could easily be adapted for political reporting, with users rating candidate’s performances in debates —link
BBC Visual Journalism
“Sportspeak” is a tool allowing journalists to input text from sports interviews and get embeddable and socially shareable cards analysing the tone, language and cliché use of the interviewee.—link
Trinity Mirror
“The Away Fans Guide” is a widget or interactive device that makes covering away day information for football matches a simple process for journalists while simultaneously providing the crucial information the audience needs in an engaging and user-friendly way.—link
And the winner is… the BBC ‘Sportspeak’
The BBC Visual Journalism team came out on top with their ‘Sportspeak’ tool. The journalist of the team, Nassos Stylianou, explains the prototype:
“We found that in a lot of sports coverage, the sports people are the focus of the coverage, which is amazing, a lot of the time in the interviews they give pre and post game, the interviews tend to be full of clichés, sports people tend to use the same words, they really don’t mean much, it’s like a generic sports speak. Basically during this couple of days, we have built a tool which takes text transcripts of interviews (for our prototype we focused on two football managers and a player), and it does two things to it.”
The prototype runs on one hand through the IBM Watson tone analyser API, where there is a sentiment analysis (anger, joy, fear, disgust…) The emotion of which is then visualised via emojis.
The second thing is that the prototype matches to the text transcripts is a pre-prepared spreadsheet of clichés that the team wrote, and it gives the numbers of clichés used in an interview. Stylianou adds:
‘The goal is it is to enable sports journalists to create fun, socially shareable content for our audience, we can also explain some of the clichés. It adds values to a lot of interviews, often long and full of clichés, making them more fun and engaging.”
The jury members Bahareh Heravi (School of Information and Communication Studies, University College Dublin), Jane Suiter (FuJo), JJ Worrall (Storyful) and Paddy Logue (the Irish Times) unanimously agreed on the quality of the winning prototype. Jury member Bahareh Heravi gave us her impressions after the pitch session:
“I really liked the BBC work because of the scope, it was perfect for a hackathon, the work was finished. I really liked that they used IBM Watson analytics API for analysis, so they really looked outside to see what is out there quickly, utilise something and then bring it back to get some interesting outcome for themselves and it was also fun.”
Jury member Jane Suiter, Director of the Institute for Future Media and journalism, said of the prototype:
“With the BBC it was just really innovative. It was really fun, it was adaptable — we thought it would be really great with politics — it was really usable, and very shareable, and also doable in a two day hackathon. It ticked all the boxes.”
A special mention was awarded to the team from TheJournal.ie and the Public Choice went to The Times.
Check all of the prototypes developed during the Editors Lab Dublin
On 24–25 February, GEN and Gruppo L’Espresso, with the support of the Google News Lab, will gather some of the best Italian media innovators in Rome for an Editors Lab focused on crisis and disaster reporting. With increased seismic activity in the region, this hackathon will mark the six-month anniversary of the August 2016 Central Italy earthquake.
