PUBLISH launches media lab ‘PUBLISHlab’
PUBLISH is pleased to announce the launch of PUBLISHlab, an in-house media innovation laboratory, geared toward news providers and readers.
“Since launching PUBLISH, we’ve strived to be at the forefront of innovation in the media industry. PUBLISHlab represents our continued commitment to this goal,” PUBLISH CEO Sonny Kwon said.
“Our mission is to build the digital tools necessary to help news providers increase audience engagement, combat misinformation, and boost income.”
PUBLISHlab is currently looking into a number of mission-aligned technological solutions including, but not limited to, a content recommendation system and a publish-to-blockchain technical specification.
Increasing audience engagement with content recommendation
We want to make news more engaging, and recommendations are an important part of that goal. A lot of large-sized news providers like BBC News are already using recommender systems, but it’s something that many smaller players haven’t (yet) come round to. And while some small to medium-sized publishers may offer recommendations, they’re often provided by plugins that promote seemingly unrelated third-party content with clickbait titles. Few publishers have systems in place that recommend high-quality news content published in-house.
To date, we’ve been looking at named entity extraction using machine learning models and combining that with cosine similarity to recommend content, but we’re constantly iterating the algorithm as we seek to improve reader experiences and increase reader engagement.
Combatting misinformation through blockchain technology
Whether it be on Facebook or Twitter, just about everyone and his dog is publishing content on the internet these days. And while that’s all well and good, it comes with its own set of problems like increased clickbait and misinformation, which creates a general sense of distrust in the media.
One way to overcome these problems and restore trust in the media is to have legitimate publishers cryptographically sign off on and index content on an immutable blockchain capable of storing metadata.
But what information should be stored on the blockchain and how? As there’s currently no formal specification to describe this, we’ve taken it upon ourselves to initiate the development of PUBLISHninjs.
PUBLISHninjs is an OpenAPI definition that describes what to publish on the blockchain. Being based on the JSON schema ninjs (News in JSON), PUBLISHninjs will offer a lightweight alternative to XML standards such as NewsML, which helps to keep blockchain transactions small.
We expect to do a lot of the initial legwork, but as the specification continues to take shape, we hope to attract other developers and news professionals to join us in building out the specification in a more collaborative manner.
These are just a couple examples of what we’re working on at PUBLISHlab, but stay tuned for more updates as we continue on our journey to make news good again.
