The Symposium on Computation and Journalism was held at the Georgia Institute of Technology on Feb. 22-23 and explored “how new computing technologies will shape and reshape the news business.”
All the videos from the Symposium are now available here in Flash Video and Quicktime Streaming formats.
Northwestern’s Rich Gordon has a nice summary here and also links to some other coverage. Rich observed that there is there also is a substantial gap between journalism and computer science.
Too many journalists don’t respect technology development as a creative activity — they think developers should just build stuff they want. Too many technologists don’t respect journalism as an intellectual activity — they think journalists just pump out content for their algorithms to process. Too many journalists really don’t like technology change; they blame it for hurting media businesses, threatening their livelihoods and diminishing the quality of news available in local communities. Too many technologists think it’s not their job to worry about the negative impact of technology innovation on media companies and journalism — and when they do think about the consequences, think only about information at the national and global level (which is broader, deeper and more accessible than ever) and not at the local level (where online news ventures rarely do the kind of original reporting that newspapers do).
