As the news process continues to be changed by social media, two South African entrepreneurs have created an award-winning project that enables online publishers to monitor, in real time, what is resonating with readers online in order to make better-informed editorial decisions.
Signalnoi.se, developed by Mohamed Nanabhay and Haroon Meer, was selected as one of the six winning projects of the first round of the Knight News Challenge 2012. The Knight News Challenge is an initiative of the Knight Foundation, the leading funder of journalism and media innovation globally.
The competition was launched in 2007, with the intention of discovering a new generation of innovations to help communities get the information they need. Since its inception, the competition has received over 13 000 applications and funded 80 projects, for a total of $27 million.
This year's Knight News Challenge is being run in three phases, with focused rounds aimed at encouraging innovation in different areas. The first round highlighted 'networks' and identified six projects that build on existing networks such as Ustream and Twitter to create new ways of informing and engaging communities. Winners of the first round were announced on 18 June.
Reconfiguration
Signalnoi.se and another start-up, Watchup (an iPad app that makes it easier to find and watch high-quality news videos), both received funding through the Knight Enterprise Fund - an early-stage venture fund that invests in for-profit ventures.
Nanabhay explains the funding is treated as an early-stage venture investment in Signalnoi.se: “Of course, the investment is not just about the money. When you look at taking on investors in your business, you want to be sure that it's smart money. And for media and journalism innovation, Knight and the network it has are about as smart as it gets.”
The idea for Signalnoi.se arose during the Arab Spring in 2011. Nanabhay was the head of Online at Al Jazeera English at the time, and was in the newsroom on 25 January 2011.
“Al Jazeera was rolling out a huge, three-part investigative story on the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, which naturally led their line-up. Other news organisations were following this story and others.
“But looking at Twitter and real-time traffic on the Al Jazeera Web site, I saw that the audience was shifting to the growing protests in Egypt. They were being covered, but were no means the top story,” explains Nanabhay. He responded to the real-time data by reconfiguring the Al Jazeera English front page and deploying the necessary newsroom resources to the story.
Nanabhay originally studied computer science and history at Wits, but went back to study the intersection of the Internet, mass media and public spaces in the Egyptian revolution as part of his Master's at the University of Cambridge.
We were really humbled by the response, but know that starting out with a bang also means there is a bit more pressure, with lots more people watching. We say, bring it.
Haroon Meer
Nanabhay and Meer had first met virtually on the ZAnet IRC network in the late 90s, and then met in person in 2002 when Nanabhay attended a training course conducted by Sensepost, where Meer was the technical director (he went on to found Thinkst, a company that solves complex problems through applied research for Fortune 500 companies and leading social networking and media companies). The two stayed in touch and had always wanted to collaborate on a project.
“Haroon read the thesis and immediately saw an opportunity to exploit the idea at scale by both automating it and doing it across large sets of data. After some rapid prototyping from Thinkst (with Jameel Haffejee, in particular, whipping out graphs at the drop of a hat), we were able to launch the alpha-version of the product that won the award,” says Nanabhay.
“The quality of ideas and projects is mind-blowing. In our case, there were over 1 000 projects that were assessed through various phases. Each time, a panel of some of the smartest people in our space reviewed our project, which provided excellent validation of our idea. Knight has an exceptional network and winning meant the product would be put in front of all the right people in the industry. In just a week after the announcement, most big news organisations had signed up to get beta access to our project.
“We were really humbled by the response, but know that starting out with a bang also means there is a bit more pressure, with lots more people watching. We say, bring it.”
Nanabhay says the original proof of concept for Signalnoi.se produced vanilla HTML reports run periodically to tell publishers how their articles from their front pages did on social networks.
“The next iteration allowed you to look across different Web sites, effectively allowing an organisation to see how they perform compared to their peers and glean insight from what others are doing well. Today, we can answer complex questions at a glance, like, 'how many stories more than a competitor did we run on the Olympics in the past month?' and 'Who gets more social traction per published article?'”
Social clarity
While suggestions have been made about applying the Signalnoi.se concept to other verticals and, more specifically, creating a consumer-facing application for people to source the best content publishers have to offer, Nanabhay and Meer say that 'those will come'. For now, they are focused on 'building a product that will bring social clarity to newsrooms and be invaluable to editors and publishers on a daily basis'.
There is great value in using a social media signal as a diagnostic tool to determine what readers are interested in (or what competitors are gaining traction on).
Haroon Meer
Speaking of the impact of social media on the traditional news cycle, Nanabhay says it has changed the ball game. “A growing number of people now consume content not through brand loyalty (ie, they don't have your Web site set as their homepage), but via social media feeds. So it's what pops up in their Twitter streams, Facebook feeds or on the front page of Reddit. News organisations need to adapt to these changes and build strategies for engagement and content promotion across these platforms.”
Nanabhay adds that despite the bad press social networking receives, it enables things that were previously unheard of. “Being able to study interactions between people from different countries during Olympic contests or determining reactions to events through distinct geographic lenses (in near real-time) is any social scientist's dream.”
Close the loop
Nanabhay and Meer believe that despite the growth of social media and its impact on the media, most organisations are still using social media chiefly as a means to push content to their readers and to 'somewhat engage' with them. “While this is a start, it leaves all the data on the table,” says Meer.
“There is great value in using a social media signal as a diagnostic tool to determine what readers are interested in (or what competitors are gaining traction on). This is where Signalnoi.se comes in.”
Meer is trying to encourage local development and to ensure SA avoids a culture of consumption. “With companies like Thinkst and Signalnoi.se, we hope to encourage more locals to throw their hats in the ring to take a chance.”
Nanabhay says Signalnoi.se now has a ton of data that is continuously growing. “So while we're building an easy interface to mine that data and allow editors to quickly discover trends, every day we think of other ways to use all that data. It's a great problem to have and we're looking for some awesome Python and front-end developers to come help us build cool things.
“Going forward, the ability to determine traction, engagement and interest is going to be huge, as it is ultimately about signaling intent. What is the audience interested in? Being able to close the loop between what publishers produce and what audiences want helps provide a qualitative edge to measurement,” says Nanabhay.
First published in the September 2012 issue of ITWeb Brainstorm magazine.
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