New data prize added to the Walkleys Media Incubator and Innovation Fund

Rose Powell
Jul 20, 2017 · 5 min read

We have exciting news — longstanding Walkley partner iSentia is investing in a key driver of journalistic innovation: data.

The Prize for Data Innovation in Journalism presented by iSentia will be awarded for the first time at the Mid-Year Walkley Awards on July 26, as part of the 2017 innovation funding round. One of the many promising data-centric projects in this year’s incubator will receive $10,000 in funding.

Tapping into the power of data is not a new business tactic, but the rise and rise of ruthlessly data-driven businesses such as Amazon, Uber and Facebook has led to an increased awareness about just how powerful understanding and using data can be.

This is true in journalism also. Data-driven journalism sometimes gets a bad rap from those who assumed it simply meant publishing more of those stories that get the most clicks. And sometimes that is what it means, but it doesn’t lead anywhere good — for example, my most-read story during my time at the Sydney Morning Herald was from the nadir of online journalism: the tale of a drunk sports player who urinated into his own mouth.

But fortunately for all of us, data plays a far bigger and more powerful role in journalism than validating the traffic potential of trashy stories.

For many of us, data journalism is about sifting through spreadsheets or databases to find or illustrate stories on some of the most important issues of our time. Data has revealed many stories that wouldn’t have been found otherwise, and opened up new ways to explain the world to our audiences.

For example, Australian journalists have used data to detail our political leaders’ favourite three-word slogans; to reveal how Australia is evolving through interactive maps drawn from census data; to explore how Australians vote and the tribes they form; and to demonstrate the emotional and physical toll of Nauru detention on asylum seekers.

Richard Spencer, iSentia’s chief marketing officer, said iSentia is offering the prize as a way to encourage journalists and entrepreneurs to create data-driven media startups, or data tools and platforms for use by journalists.

“If journalism doesn’t embrace the need to pivot around data then the profession will struggle in a data-led world. Helping to create innovative use of data in all industries is a key brand driver for Isentia,” Spencer said.

“Data creates and completes an organisation’s view of the world. There are more available data sources than ever before, and competitive advantage for many organisations is as simple as a more effective use of the data available to them.”

About a third of the 110 projects that made it into our 2017 incubator made data a focus, according to one of our early surveys. And about 80 per cent were considering how to incorporate data into their projects.

Here’s just a flavor of what we saw throughout the program, run with the support of key partners such as Google and iSentia — three of the data-journalism projects as described by the participants:

Article Intelligence by Andy Ball and Peter Borbely
Article Intelligence is a text editor extension to allow journalists to add location and relational metadata to their stories while they are writing them. Stories are often about people and places. Some are about specific points on a map, other relate more broadly to administrative boundaries likes suburbs, school zones or electorates.

When people are reading and engaged with an article online it is a common strategy to suggest relevant content to them. Geographical proximity to the reader is one obvious but underused way of making content relevant. The problem is that many articles get published without ever having had their relationships to places defined in very meaningful ways.

Natural language processing (NLP) can be used to identify places within a story. However, NLP can struggle to work out all of the salient details of a story with 100 percent certainty. The journalist who wrote the story is in the best position to clarify questions that NLP cannot answer definitively. However the technology and the human have not been brought together at the right point.

Worldview by Richard Shannon
We’re spending a lot of time online, engaging with new information, events and ideas. All the while we’re generating enormous amounts valuable data about ourselves. And yet all this data is lost as soon as we create it! We’re not in control and realise nowhere near it’s true value.

We could instead be doing so much more. We could be learning about our personality, views and beliefs and how they compare with those around us. We could be creating and sharing unique insights. We could be influencing the outcomes of public debate with accurate and real-time stats on our collective views and beliefs. With this data we could be embarking on a fascinating lifelong project of growing, testing, exploring and revising our views and beliefs. Our worldview.

Data Explorer by Kaho Cheung
Data Explorer is an online tool to explore and visualise 300 ABS data sets with an interactive and intuitive website. While the project will be publicly available online, journalists and academics may find the embeddable chart function the most useful. This tool allows non-technical people to build smart, interactive charts in minutes. I also hope the general public will use this tool, leading to increased data fluency across the country.

The Prize for Data Innovation in Journalism presented by iSentia is selected by our innovation judges, who award funding to the most promising ideas in the Walkleys Media Incubator and Innovation Fund program. You can find out more about the program and what the judges are looking for here.

The Walkley Magazine

Inside the Australia and New Zealand media – stories by and for journalists.

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Rose Powell

Written by

Growth and startup discovery at rampersand venture fund. Priors: Walkley innovation manager, Canva growth and comms, Fairfax journo.

The Walkley Magazine

Inside the Australia and New Zealand media – stories by and for journalists.

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