David Caswell, Executive Product Manager at the BBC News Labs, the BBC’s incubator charged with driving innovation in news.
A foundational challenge facing journalism in the digital environment is sense-making from large volumes of stand-alone text artefacts produced by the digital ecosystem. Within journalism (and also scientific publishing, intelligence services, enterprise knowledge management, law, etc) the response to that tsunami of text artefacts has initially focused on search, and then on machine learning-driven personalised recommendations. Increasingly, however, major news organisations are exploring structured approaches to news (“structured journalism”), in which the journalistic artefacts are smaller than articles and are assembled in different ways for different purposes.
Caswell will be sharing his vision about how the production, distribution and archiving of news is changing, and how his work is addressing these challenges. His recent research includes work on structured journalism and natural language generation for news at the Missouri School of Journalism. His recent projects at the BBC include automating production of articles for local and election news, and story models for adaptable news storytelling. He was previously product leader for content understanding at Yahoo!. This talk is presented in collaboration between Turing and British Library 21st Century Curatorship talks series.
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