Beat: where data meets storytelling
The winning project at the Walkleys Editors Lab in Sydney was “BEAT: A real-time visualisation of breaking news”, created by the team from The West Australian.
Last March, the Global Editors Network and the Walkley Foundation, with the support of Google, held the first hackathon of its kind in Australia, bringing together 13 teams of up-and-coming Australian media innovators. The theme was “Data-driven Stories: Find or tell stories with data” and the team from The West Australian, a locally edited daily newspaper published in Perth, finished first with their prototype Beat.
The newly formed team of three, including editor Ben Martin, designer Sophia Lewis and developer Joe Hardy, who had been out of the coding game for years, entered the hackathon with only a vague list of bullet points of ideas and a change of heart halfway through the event.
Their strategy was simple. Instead of trying to change the world, the team focused on simplifying a complex data system that already exists, in order to make story finding and telling that much easier. Their pitch was to create a newsroom tool allowing journalists to easily identify where police incidents are happening, determine their newsworthiness, and find the best way to respond to them.
Beat does just that. It filters incomprehensible masses of data from the West Australian police dispatch system, which is made available to newsrooms via a password-protected website, into an easy-to-understand map of the city, where the locations of police interventions are clearly shown and categorised into levels of newsworthiness, seriousness and urgency.
This visual allows reporters to respond to breaking news events quickly without the usual scrambling and scribbling, frantic phone calls and text messages. Beat therefore greatly improves a journalist’s access to a story, in turn ensuring that the general public has the most usable and up to date local information.
The prototype was fully functional at the Editors Lab with live data being fed into the system through a secure feed, and it was up and running internally in the newsroom only two weeks later.
The team is now working on layering more useful data onto Beat, such as geo-localising staff and vehicles to ensure that the right person with the right equipment is on the right job. Information about road closures or traffic jams, which may hinder the reporter from getting to the event quickly, is also being layered onto the tool.
Another exciting added element is trend identification, where the reporter can filter a certain type of crime to identify if, for example, a particular area is currently affected by burglaries. This information could then be used to warn people to lock up and hide under their covers!
The team’s main challenge now is to get people to take advantage of Beat. While there has been interest in the tool internally, there is no active reliance on it just yet, which the team’s developer Joe puts down to an “old habits die hard” attitude by reporters.
“The success of the product, like all software products, depends on there being a completed feedback loop, so the most important thing is to get reporters to use it. Once it is being used, reporters will start to understand it and feed into it, which will consequently drive it.” Joe said.
The hackathon proved to be an ideal setting for the team from The West Australian, as the time limit didn’t allow for overthinking and overcomplicating, leading to a simple, no-nonsense product. The agile headspace of the Editors Lab itself has inspired The West Australian to host similar hackathons internally, so they continue to hack the newsroom successfully.
Beat breaks down barriers between editorial and tech, proving just how useful data can be to storytelling. “The crux of everything we do is telling stories and telling them well. Beat will help us identify those stories quickly, and respond quickly.” said Ben Martin.
