adrian holovaty

April 15, 2004, 11:03 PM ET

Google News deserves finalist status in journalism awards

The folks on Poynter's Online-News mailing list have been debating whether it was fair for judges to have named the entirely-automated Google News a finalist in this year's EPpy Awards. Here, for what it's worth, is what I posted to the list:

I just took a look at the list of 2003 EPpy winners.

In 2003, ESPN.com was named Best Internet Sports Service. A prominent feature of ESPN.com is its Gamecast technology, which displays graphics and stats for sporting events in real time. Sure, humans somewhere enter that data, but as far as ESPN.com is concerned, Gamecast is automated. It is made possible by software algorithms.

Also last year, CBS MarketWatch.com was named Best Internet Business Service. That site has an amazing amount of dynamically created market information -- graphics, tables, averages, all sliced and diced in convenient ways. I'm willing to bet that few humans at CBS MarketWatch are involved with day-to-day generation of that content.

The point, as these somewhat contrived examples show, is that many Web sites -- and probably *most* big-media sites in 2004 -- are maintained by algorithms to some extent. Programmers, not necessarily journalists, write the code. Google News just takes that to the extreme.

Please note my bias as a professional programmer, but I'd say a news application developed by computer scientists is just as deserving of journalism awards as a collection of news stories produced by traditional journalists.

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April 4, 2004, 4:59 PM ET

Topix.net redux

A while ago, I criticized Topix.net for having hypocritical Terms of Service. Now, I'm happy to say Topix CEO Rich Skrenta has responded to my criticisms in the comments section of John Battelle's Searchblog.

You know weblogs are a good thing when some guy in Kansas can spout opinions in a comment forum and have his concerns addressed by the person most directly involved.

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April 1, 2004, 1:39 AM ET

Newsmap idea could be worth stealing

Newsmap is fascinating. It's a graphical way of looking at the top stories in the news landscape, using information gleaned from Google News. The site's creator has written a bit about how it works. (Thanks for the pointer, John Battelle.)

I don't think this exact approach would work for a local news operation, such as the one I work for, because, frankly, there's not that much local news in a single day -- and the graphic would look more like a Rothko than a mosaic.

But some slightly different approaches might work. How about graphics that display...

• ...the most-covered topics in a particular newspaper over a time period. If a site's publishing system categorizes stories, it can, in theory, create a list of the categories containing the most stories.
• ...the most important news stories on a site over a time period. A single day's worth of news might be too little, but a month's worth could work.
• ...the most commented-on news stories for a news site with user comments enabled on a per-story basis.

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