Improving the way the media covers disasters: Tokyo Editors Lab edition
Some of the best Japanese media innovators attended the latest Editors Lab hackathon to devise new ways of covering disasters. Hosted by ONA Japan, and with the support of the Google News Lab, the event gathered 10 teams composed of journalists, developers and designers, who worked intensely for two days. The winning prototype, by the joined team of BuzzFeed Japan and Yahoo! Japan, built TaSKAL.
In the Philippines back in July 2016, our Manila Editors Lab first focused on the theme of disaster coverage. The team from D5 won the hackathon.
More information here
Back in February, marking the six-month anniversary of the August 2016 central Italy earthquake, GEN and Gruppo L’Espresso organised an Editors Lab in Rome, to improve disaster coverage. You can read more about it by following the link below:
In May, the same topic was issued for ten teams in Japan for the Tokyo Editors Lab. Teams from Asahi Shimbun, BuzzFeed Japan, Fuji Television Network, NewsPicks, NHK, Nikkei, Nippon Broadcasting System, Yahoo! Japan, and the Yomiuri Shimbun all came along to work during two days.
Getting prepared on a difficult topic required some insights from experts:
The Tokyo Editors Lab opened with presentations from experts Irene Jay Liu from Google News Lab, Jun Hori from Garden Inc and Tetsu Imai from NHK on innovative video storytelling project and helping the participating teams understand how to tackle this specific issue.
Irene Jay Lui
The Google News Lab representative at the event, Irene Jay Lui, demoed the different Google News Lab tools to the participants and how they can be used during a disaster.
How the world wanted to help
The recent earthquake in Nepal was given as an exemple on how tools such as Google Earth and Google Trends can be used by journalists. A New York Times article was also using Google Street View to show the extend of the damages, using photography from before and after the earthquake.
Lui also presented Google Crisis Response, and how it was used in Japan to . Also described to the participants, Crisis Map, and how it was used to cover the typhoon Ruby updates in the Philippines, and floodings in Myanmar.
Jun Hori on the relevance of user-generated content
Frustrated with the coverage of Fukushima accident and with reports on the disaster and how far radiation was spreading, Jun Hori started tweeting uncensored coverage. After getting “a huge response,” his superiors asked him to stop after receving “complaints from politicians.” Eventually, Hori started 8-Bit News, his own citizen journalism website, where anyone can submit its own content. “Fukushima showed people in Japan had to be proactive about getting information.”
Hori also founded Garden Journalism, a website hoping to “offer a type of journalism where everyone can participate in their own way.”
“Big newspapers just follow big stories and not individual stories,” mentions Hori, explaining why he started his new venture.
Tetsu Imai’s presentation of the NHK emergency setup
In March 2011 an earthquake closely followed by the tsunami struck the East Coast of Japan, taking the lives of more than twenty thousand people. Testu Imai, director of the data journalism unit at NHK, shared with us some of the details of the broadcaster emergency coverage setup.
The basic procedure of the disaster alert system which foremost priority is to save lives, is the following: Whenever the Japanese Meteorological Agency (JMA) records a significant earthquake, data is transmitted instantly to NHK. The broadcaster can automatically display the alerts urging the population to go to safety only seconds after the first piece of data is received. Those messages are transmitted in different languages across the country.
After the earthquake of 2011, NHK used big data to visualise the scale of the disaster and to better understand how the evacuations went. By analysing the data from cell phone towers and GPS chips, NHK for instance managed to visualise the huge traffic jams in coastline city generated by the evacuation (1.4 million cars) and could see when people started coming back to the flooded areas after the tsunami. Testu Imai called this new kind of reporting “data-driven” disaster coverage.
This data-driven coverage proved itself to be useful to understand the mechanism of certain types of damages. Tetsu Imai referred to fires breaking out hours after the earthquake of 1996. By picking up two sets of data, NHK managed to link the fires with the restoration of electrical power in households. Those “energisation fires” were prevented in recent earthquake after the population was advised to cut the power to their breaker boxes before evacuation. The authorities believe it prevented the outbreak of fires, potentially saving lives.
List of projects built during the event
During two days, the ten teams brainstormed, refined their concepts and started building their prototypes. These are the results:
- Asahi Shimbun—Timely Disaster Responder
- Asahi Shimbun (newspaper)—TenDenKo
- BuzzFeed Japan & Yahoo! News—TaSKAL:Information for disaster victim
- Fuji Television Network—Hyperlocal Disaster Reporting
- NewsPicks—The most simple way to survive
- NHK—Creeping Crisis
- Nikkei—How to spot fake news
- Nippon Broadcasting System—RE:PORT
- Yahoo! Japan—Disaster Coverage Network
- The Yomiuri Shimbun—Tsunami Prevention
And the winner was…
The jury composed of Irene Jay Liu from Google News Lab, Makoto Yasutomi from Kobe Gakuin University, Haruyuki Seki from Georepublic Japan, Kaori Sowada from Softbank and GEN’s Évangéline de Bourgoing decided on the most promising prototype as the winner of the hackathon.
The joined team from Buzzfeed Japan and Yahoo! Japan won the competition with their prototype TasKAL.
TasKAL is a CMS for journalists to send helpful information to victims. It includes templates which are made from the search data of disaster victims.
Special mentions were awarded to the teams of Yahoo! Japan and Nippon Broadcasting System.
BuzzFeed Japan Editor-in-Chief, Daisuke Furuta:
Every year Japan suffer from earthquake and flood. Disaster report is one of most important for Japanese medium, but most of disaster reports are to report what happens in disaster struck area for people who live outside the area. How can we give disaster victims important information like “Where is shelter?” or “How to care babes and moms under disaster?”. Our team is consists of journalist from BuzzFeed Japan, and engineer and designer from Yahoo! JAPAN. We analyzed Yahoo!’s search data during Kumamoto earthquake last year and figured out what victims wanted to know at that time. Then we made a CMS with many templates which are about important information for victims. After that we also developed a web site optimized for mobile phone. It makes it much easier for people to get information.
Our goal is to innovate disaster report for disaster victim to help them. We believe our tool TaSKAL which means “it helps me” can be something for it.
Jury member Makoto Yasutomi, from Kobegakuin University, on the winners’ project:
“The crisis reporting is a very hard problem to solve, and all these young people are well aware of it. They have a passion to actually solve it, I was very happy about that. Two things really impressed me in this prototype. First, is how reporters can connect directly to the platform, without any interference from the news desk or their bosses.
During the Kobe earthquake, news desks interfered and some important news were missed; this next generation of reporters is pushing the idea of being straight forward with such news (during a crisis), and let the readers judge the news themselves. Second thing that impressed me is this idea of an ideal way of collaboration during crisis. In Japan, more earthquakes are expected in the future, we expect one in Tokyo eventually, so, of course there is competition, but it should be more about collaboration and communication during such events. It was very heartwarming to see the younger generation care this much, that’s my biggest overall impression of the event.”
Jury member Kaori Kowada, from Softbank:
“This project was good because it was not about what you do during a crisis, but what you do before, for being more prepared.”
The winning team from BuzzFeed Japan and Yahoo! Japan will join other winning teams from the countries taking part in the fifth Editors Lab season and compete for the title at the Editors Lab Final in Vienna during the seventh annual GEN Summit, 21–23 June 2017.
📸 All the photos of the event can be found here.
