9-10 APRIL 2015

EDITORS LAB NETHERLANDS - FINAL REPORT

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www.globaleditorsnetwork.org/editorslab

Summary: The #EditorsLab Programme

The GEN Editors Lab programme is a worldwide series of hackdays hosted by leading news organisations such as The New York Times, The Guardian and El País. Editors Lab brings together developers, journalists and designers from top newsrooms to build news prototypes during an intensive two-day competition. The Global Editors Network has already run two successful Editors Lab seasons and the third season (2014-2015) is already up and running.

About the Global Editors Network

The Global Editors Network is a cross-platform community empowering newsrooms through programmes designed to inspire, connect and share. The Global Editors Network (GEN) is committed to sustainable journalism, empowering newsrooms and media innovators through a variety of programmes designed to inspire, connect and share. The organisation is a community of more than 1000 Editors-in-Chief and media professionals from all platforms. It is a non-profit, non-governmental association.

About NOS

As the biggest source of news coverage in the Netherlands, NOS offers reliable, independent round-the-clock news reporting, seven days a week, on the latest news, sports and national and international events. This takes place real-time using multiple media channels including radio, (Internet connected) television, www.nos.nl, narrow casting, social networks, mobile applications, games computers and other devices with an Internet connection.

About Google

Google’s mission is to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. The Editors Lab programme was founded with the support of Google in 2011. Thanks to Google, GEN has been able to run Editors Labs for data journalists and designers all over the world.

Contents

2 Summary 2 About Global Editors Network2 About NOS2 About Google3 Logos and Participating Teams3 The Speakers, the Jury & the theme4 The Winner5 Other Projects6 Social Media and Press7 Survey Responses8 GEN Contacts

External Links

GEN Community WebsiteThe Global Editors Network WebsiteGEN Board MembersData Journalism AwardsStartups for NewsEditors Lab Programme

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Teams’ Logos

Participating teams

NDC Mediagroep De TelegraafLocalFocus1Limburg (L1)The Post OnlineNOS NieuwsYournalismFollow The Money

The Speakers

• Ezra Eeman, Head of Vrt Startup at VRT and founder of Journalism Tools • Bart Brouwers, founder and co-owner of Media52 • Detlef La Grand, founder VRmaster.co.

The Jury

• Bram Alkema from Eluced • Evangeline de Bourgoing from GEN • Kees van Mourik from Youwe • Yvo de Ruiter from Design Affair

The Theme

The theme was “News in Context” - developing new ways to anticipate what users want before they turn on their devices. Participating teams were asked to develop new and innovative user engagement mechanisms based on a user's context: location, browsing habits, moods, etc.

Ezra Eeman, Head of Vrt Startup at VRT and founder of Journalism Tools

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The Winner

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The team from Dutch public broadcaster NOS won the two-day #EditorsLab competition in Amsterdam with their innovative app, News Stretch. News Stretch was designed to know what its user is up to and what the user needs. The application uses a range of sensors in the user’s phone and feeds him or her news from the NOS database.

Tim van Steenbergen, Matthijs Ijkema and Jim Haakman were the media innovators behind the NOS app. “News gives context to your world,” they explained. “But your world, the things you do, the places you visit, changes constantly throughout your day. So should the way in which we offer you news. This is News Stretch. It’s based on existing research about news consumption. At NOS, we've established different needs that vary in importance during the day. Our existing platforms and content are based on those needs. News Stretch clusters those needs in a single product.”

Jan de Jong, CEO of NOS, presented the winning team with their award.

The NOS team will now compete against the other winning Editors Lab teams during the #EditorsLab Final: the World Cup of Newsroom Innovation. This final stage of the Editors Lab international tournament will occur during the GEN Summit 2015 in Barcelona in June.

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Other Projects

Trust Tacker: Follow the Money created Trust Tracker - a virtual X-ray machine that rates the trustworthiness of persons, companies and institutions. It uses journalistic methods to analyse interest, expose conflicts of interest, explain networks and reveal dirty little secrets. It works as a Wordpress plugin, so it can be used by any Wordpress website.

Baboonr: Yournalism built Baboonr, taking its name from the baboon. The Baboonr prototype allows the user to find the most relevant related content with just one click. (See beta.baboonr.nl.)

“Leen een mening” ('Loan an opinion’): ThePostOnline developed an application designed to get people talking. Everywhere you look, everywhere you go, people are occupied by their phones, staring at their screens. “Leen een mening” provides people with a topic for a myriad of social situations, based on their own preferences, all the while, sharing ThePostOnline's news and stories.

The Telegraaf Appdate: The app from De Telegraaf keeps you informed about the things you are interested in when you want and how long you want. You can choose for a 5 minute edition, a 10 minute edition or a 15 minute edition based on the time that you have to get up-to-date with the latest news. The team used a native iPhone built using Facebook's React Native framework. The data was provided through a JSON REST-api.

LocalFocus: LocalFocus is a data management and visualization platform which makes it easy to get new insights from datasets and to share them with colleagues and audience.

Moodnews: 1Limburg’s app personalises news based on Preferences, Mood, Location, Behaviour, Time and Location.

SmartSection: NDCMediaGroep built an app that combines learnings in broader digital marketing (MBTI classifications) with recent studies on needs in visiting news sites (stay updated, don't miss a thing, experience, form an opinion).

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Social Media

Press

Broadcast Magazine:

NOS.nl:

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Survey Responses

Q1: How would you describe your experience of the event as a whole?

• Challenging, inspiring and a nice experience as a whole. • Interesting, inspiring, fun. • A fun first experience, with cool people.

Q2: What was the most useful part of the event for you? Why?

• The speed geeking was a nice segment: high speed, very rich content, loads of inspiring ideas. • Thinking and building a concept in a short period of time. Being away from your daily routine. • Connecting with other competitors and participating a hackathon made me feel very inspired.

Q3: What was the least useful part? Why?

• The first pitch session. It gave a sense of what the other teams where doing, but the pitch format did more harm than good. I think an informal presentation without time pressure would be better in that stage.

• The virtual reality workshop, since it wasn't really well thought through, although that still had some fun hooks!

Q4: What did you learn during these Hackdays?

• The challenges and possibilities of a short concept development period. • The way other news organisations work, concepting under time pressure, improving pitching and

presenting. • That focus and teamwork are awesome ingredients for products.

Q5: What did you think about the schedule of the Hackdays?

• Works. • Just perfect. Should not be longer than two days. Working 24 hours in a row does not seem very useful

or productive. • Fine, not too many workshops, enough time for hacking.

Q6: What did you think about the pitch session?

• The first one was a bit unnecessary. The final pitch session was great. • The questions that came from the extra jury members who were present at the final pitch didn't seem very

well prepared (as far as that was possible). Maybe it would have helped if they were present at the first 1 minute pitch.

• It was fun; not too stiff, which was nice.

Q7: What did you think about the masterclasses? Were they relevant? Were they too long?

• The first one (VRT) was good. The second gave a lot of discussion, but the idea was immature and did not match the subject of the hackaton as it should.

• Not too long and especially the Journalism Tools class was very relevant. • I think the first one from the VRT speaker was very useful as it was inspiring, quick and valuable.

Q8: What did you think of the theme? For our next Hackdays, on which theme would you like to work?

• It was broad and vague, a little more scope would be nice. Curation would be a nice theme. • The theme is relevant but maybe it makes editors think too much in the same direction (location and

personalisation). • I think the team might have been more clearer and could maybe use a little context (even though the

theme was context), but I think the end results all got the theme very clear.

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Contact

Evangeline de Bourgoing Programmes Managers

edebourgoing@globaleditorsnetwork.org 00 33 76 05 94 543

Karen Burke Director of Communications

kburke@globaleditorsnetwork.org 0033 69 91 62 628

14, rue des Minimes 75003 Paris

France

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