The Global Editors Network (GEN) and the Institute for Future Media & Journalism at Dublin City University (FuJo), with the support of the Google News Lab, hosted top newsrooms from Ireland and the UK in Dublin for an Editors Lab focused on developing new sports journalism prototypes, on 25–26 November 2016.
From live blogging to user-generated content, eight teams of “news-hackers” (journalists, designers and developers) gathered to develop and present new tools for newsrooms invested in exploring the potential for innovation in sports reporting.
The winning team was from the BBC (Nassos Stylianou, journalist, Joy Roxas, UX designer; and Alvin Ourrad, developer) with their prototype sportspeak. “'Sportspeak' is a tool allowing journalists to input text from sports interviews and get embeddable and socially shareable cards analysing the tone, language and cliché use of the interviewee. The emotion is then visualised via emojis." Stylianou said. "The goal is it is to enable sports journalists to create fun, socially shareable content for our audience, we can also explain some of the clichés. It adds values to a lot of interviews, often long and full of clichés, making them more fun and engaging.”
The jury members (listed below) collectively agreed on the quality of the winning prototype. Jury member Jane Suiter, from FuJo, stated, “With the BBC it was just really innovative. It was really fun, it was adaptable — we thought it would be really great with politics — it was really usable, and very shareable, and also doable in a two-day hackathon. It ticked all the boxes.”
The winning team from the BBC will join other winning teams from the countries taking part in the fifth Editors Lab season and compete for the title at the Editors Lab Final in Vienna during the seventh annual GEN Summit, 21-23 June 2017.
The jury awarded a special mention to The Journal.ie for their prototype The42 Player Ratings and the Public Choice went to The Times for Enhance.
All projects from the Dublin Editors Lab can be found here.
