News Insight, In Seconds
Jinfo Blog

By Robin Neidorf

Abstract

Acquire Media's white paper 'Delving into News with Visualisation' provides new insight into "news in sight" as well as practical examples of how visualisation can change the velocity and effectiveness of research for you and your clients. Robin Neidorf explains why next-generation research tools are so powerful, why technology is essential to identify patterns in massive volumes of data, and what visualisation can offer researchers.

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Chief scientist for Acquire Media, Larry Rafsky, comments in one of his articles on visualisation: "News in sight might not provide news insight." 

Researchers know that the real meat of what they (or their clients) want to know is not easily pulled from the first five links on a search result page. It's buried in the dozens, hundreds, or thousands of news items that directly relate to or peripherally touch on their scope of interest.

Next-Generation Research

That's where visualisation comes in, and it's what separates a next-generation research tool from the other ways knowledge workers access news: alerts, feeds, and web searching.

There is a natural evolution to how industries adapt to and incorporate technology. First, we apply technology to do what humans can already do, but do it faster or more efficiently. The first "automobiles" were engines that pulled carts for people to sit in, because they were originally believed to be essentially more efficient horses.

Identifying Patterns

After a few generations of innovation, we start to discover the unique capabilities of the technology - what can it do that humans never can?

With news research, technology can assemble and normalise massive volumes of input, analyse it, and deliver it to human eyes in meaningful patterns. Actually, in patterns that are not just meaningful but interactive - the heat map you can click into and reorganise to highlight different elements of the data, the tag cloud you can refocus on an outlying term you never before considered to be part of "the story".

Visualisation Offers New Insights

As a journalist and researcher, my modus operandi has always been to gather the data and then look for what it tells me. Is there a gap in existing analysis that indicates untapped opportunity? Why are so many stakeholders concerned about something my clients consider to be a secondary issue? Who knew that labour shortages were having such an impact on our area of study?

This is what visualisation tools applied to news can do. If basic research lets me answer a question, visualisation enables me to ask and answer better questions - to leapfrog the tedious data crunching from 15 articles into a world where tools show me and let me interact with patterns reflecting more articles than I could skim if I did nothing else for the rest of my career.

In minutes. Sometimes seconds.

Find Out More - Request a Copy of the Report

The sections in the paper FreePint Report: Delving into News with Visualisation will give you "new insight on news in sight", as well as practical examples of how visualisation can change the velocity and effectiveness of research for you and your clients. If you haven't yet experimented with visualisation tools, I encourage you to start. Your research questions and results may never be the same.

Request a free copy of the FreePint Report: Delving into News with Visualisation, from Acquire Media.

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