Algorithms, Journalism & Democracy

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Kelly McBride of the Poynter Institute was on hand to discuss the importance in how news information is distributed and Gilad Lotja a Data Scientists from beta works represented the complex side of the equation providing what was most likely high level information to a mixed audience of journalists and marketers.

Kelly that algorthems are the key to how we discover and find information, and when we search for something online we expect to the website to contain the exact information we are looking for.

The marketplace has now shifted to where anyone can publish information and people who want to know what news is important say “News will find me.” The problem with this is that the news that finds them is based on an algorithm that focuses on not what is important, but rather what is popular and trending. Organizations that are very tech savy and but do not have the intentional of publishing hard news, or reliable news and are only interested in traffic and page views for advertising.

Gilad broke down seven areas a algoritm looks at when deciding what content to show:

    Time frame
    Threshhod
    Normalization
    Smoothing
    Decay factor
    Distance or scoring function

Algorithms are basically trend identification and news organizations are economic machines that are beginning to react to these algorithms and are producing news based around these algorithms. The marketplace of ideas is not open, it is based on algorithems that an engineer has built.

Kelly says that new literacy must become part of the curriculum to keep educated informed society as move to more of the information we found based on algorithms.

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