The aim of hackers in #newsHACK is to produce a prototype within 24 hours to win in one of the challenge categories set out below.
Challenge Categories
- Best visual news experience that scales.
- Best live and breaking news experience.
- Best use of linked data in journalist tools.
When addressing these challenges participants will be considering: Social, Local, Mobile, Personalised, Scalable, Contextual. See the “Horizontals” further down this page.
Plus, there is the “Surprise Us” Category
4. There will also be a “ Surprise Us ” category for innovative hacks that don’t fit in the above 3 categories.
Further Background to Challenges 1 & 2
Best visual news experience that scales
Visual content, like pictures, videos, and infographics, are very valuable in helping audiences to understand complex news stories, but they present some challenges for news providers:
- This type of content tends to be produced in one-off formats that can’t be easily replicated. In order to meet audience demand for visual content, news organisations need to produce it in a more templated way, and ensure that it works across different devices.
- Many people don’t consciously seek out visual content, but they appreciate it when they find it. If news organisations want to be associated with high-quality visual content, they need to produce it more consistently, and tell audiences where to look for it.
Best live and breaking news experience
In today’s 24 hour news culture, audiences expect access to the latest news, whenever they want it.
On top of this, growth in the number of ways in which news organisations can communicate with their audiences – for example via mobile devices – mean increasing opportunities for delivering news updates and breaking news as they happen.
In this context, there’s a real need for news organisations to package and present both ‘live’ (ie. ‘as it happens’) and breaking (ie. ‘has just happened’) news in a clear and compelling way online.
The online context throws up some specific challenges however. Among them:
- What are the best ways to alert and direct audiences to the ‘newest’ content where stories are still ‘active’, and to differentiate this from stories that are currently dormant?
- What are the best content formats to deliver live or breaking stories online? For example, what are the roles of videos, still images, text updates?
- How do we best present different sources of live and breaking news? For example, what is the role of updates from journalists vs. content contributed by audiences themselves?
- How is live and breaking news best delivered? For example what is the role of alerts pushed to a user vs. chronologically (rather than editorially) ordered live news streams?
“Horizontals” – Questions to be considered across the different briefs
Social
How could your idea capitalise on social activity online?
- How do we make the most of environments where news organisations have been ‘invited in’ by audiences (eg. Facebook or Twitter feeds)?
- We know that some audiences enjoy sharing news stories – what (if any) role does this play in your idea?
- How might your idea utilise user-generated content, eg. comments, videos, photos?
Personalisation
To what extent does your idea allow audiences to tailor news content to their specific interests/ needs?
- How do we use data from a specific user’s previous online journeys to increase the relevance of the news we’re delivering?
- What is the role of log-ins in creating a more personalised news experience?
- For users who don’t want to log in, how could we let them save their preferences around the types of stories they interested in?
- And given that most audiences appreciate being alerted to the very biggest news stories (even if they fall outside their personalised preferences), how do we ensure that personalised experiences still allow us this flexibility?
Local
How might your idea help audiences to find content related to their local area?
- Would the areas be user-defined or predetermined?
- Would location be automatically detected or user-inputted?
- How might you meet the needs of those interested in several different locations?
- Could you allow different users to dial up or dial down the amount of local news they see?
Mobile
How would your idea work on mobiles and tablets?
- As well as optimising for different screen sizes, how might your idea respond to the different ways in which people consume news on different device? Eg. smartphone users might just be looking for the headlines, whereas tablet owners might be more interested in long-form features.
- How might your idea take advantage of native mobile functionality?
- How might your idea work for users with limited or no connectivity, eg. downloading content to read later?