Ask Slashdot: How Do News Organizations Keep Track of So Much Information? 77
dryriver writes: Major news organizations from CNN, BBC, ABC to TIME magazine, the New York Times and the Economist publish a tremendous amount of information, especially now that almost everybody runs a 24/7 updated website alongside their TV channel, magazine or newspaper. Question: How do news organizations actually keep track of what must be 1000s of pieces of incoming information that are processed into news stories every day? If they are using software to manage all this info -- which makes a lot of sense -- is it off-the-shelf software that anybody can buy, or do major news organizations typically commission IT/software contractors to build them a custom "Information Management System" or similar? If there is good off-the-shelf software for managing a lot of information, who makes it and what is it called?
If it's the left, just a narrative will do. (Score:4, Funny)
If it follows the narrative, they keep and publish it.
If it doesn't, they purge it.
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If it's the right, information is not needed. Just shout it loudly and it must be true.
Re: If it's the left, just a narrative will do. (Score:1)
What a time to be alive. The right supporting Russia.
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Please note that it's the Republican Party more than the political right. The Republicans are a centrist party. The closest thing you will get to a politically "right" party these days are the Libertarian or Federalist parties.
Re: If it's the left, just a narrative will do. (Score:1)
The Republicans are a centrist party
Bwahahahaha.... oh, wait, you think you're serious?
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Please note that it's the Republican Party more than the political right. The Republicans are a centrist party. The closest thing you will get to a politically "right" party these days are the Libertarian or Federalist parties.
on scale of left to right to 0-100 democrat party are maybe 60 and republicans are 80.
don't pretend you have a centrist party. if republicans are centrist then democrats are communists and you know very well that they aren't even close..
thats the scale if you look at globally, like, if you look in terms of what kind of politics you could be running in the country it's all right from the center.
I mean you could be just as well be trying to argue that democrats are a socialist party...
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Correct. Over here in Europe the Democrats would be a right wing party. The US leans very much to the right. Which is not a bad thing, but just an observation.
Or, if you put it in relative terms, over here, Europe leans very much to the left. Just an observation.
Re: If it's the left, just a narrative will do. (Score:2)
Pulling numbers like 60 and 80 out of your ass is just the kind of superficial and tendentious analysis we have come to expect from the American left.
In fact the very assumption of a strict left right direction is b.s. For example, although communists/socialists and fascists are conventionally located at the far left and far right, they are ideologically quite close. Progressives are a little more moderate, but also close to either.
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No they are not. We have abandoned centrists, what ever party we most align to seems the most centrist. But the odd dicominary is while most people wants to seem like they are a centrist they normally reject voting for the more centrist person. Why because you can be a polar opposite of a centrist. You may be pro choice but wants less gun owner restrictions. While the centrist who is running would be pro life and wants more gun restrictions.
The parties to survive need to be non centrist. Because then t
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True for all outlets more than 5 years old and 90% less than 5.
Both sides have 'stories', which is all they need.
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If you have ever read a news story where you have first hand knowledge of what is being reported, then you should know that most articles get a lot of facts wrong, and sometimes are wildly inaccurate. So the premise of the questions is wrong.
Q: How do news organizations keep track of so much info?
A: They don't.
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try this:
search foxnews.com for any story on "Chris Corley"
you won't find any stories on the night he threatened his wife with a gun
nor will you discover that he was a sitting South Carolina state legislature representative
(he has since resigned, but only after media coverage forcing the South Carolina legislature to follow their ethics rules)
You can find the news in the local newspaper in Aiken, South Carolina
Bottom line - don't pretend that the left is the "bad" side
The right hides news that doesn't fit i
Re: If it's the right.... (Score:1)
If a fact proves you wrong, call it fake news and build a conspiracy theory with no basis to distract your base with nonsense long enough for their tiny minds to forget the fact that would have changed their world view.
Re:If it's the left, just a narrative will do. (Score:5, Insightful)
There is truth to this.
You don't have to keep or manage information if you can just make up whatever you want and cite "a source familiar with the situation." I have never before in my life seen news organizations rely so heavily on anonymous sources. CNN, ABC, MSNBC, etc., they slap whatever they want up onto their sites, say that "someone told them so," and when the story is later proven false, eh, maybe they issue a correction. Maybe. Mostly they just let it sit out there.
Pretty sad, but news organizations don't seem to care about the truth anymore. They care more about pushing an agenda and, even more so, making money. What gets money right now? Yup, trying to convince the world that Trump is the next Adolf Hitler, we're all going to turn into cannibals by 2040, and every police officer in America just wants to shoot black people for funsies.
It's pretty sad. I get more reliable, fact-driven news about the USA from European sources than domestic sources.
Hate Trump all you want (I'm not a fan either), but he has thrust into the spotlight what many people have known for a long, long time now: The major news media companies are Democrat party lapdogs (save Fox News, which is a Republican party lapdog but that is changing with the Murdochs running the channel). I don't see it getting any better either, because as long as they publish negative stories about Trump (and glowing stories about Obama and Clinton) their audience doesn't care if the stories are true or not. They're stuck in a tribal mindset. "My people GOOD. Those people BAD."
And that's it. That's all most people seem to care about anymore. Us vs. Them. The truth doesn't have a place in Us vs. Them. Us vs. Them makes money, it makes you Feel Good, it makes you crave more.
Instead of Us vs. Them, all of this rampant tribalism, I highly suggest trying Truth vs. Fiction. Be on the side of Truth. If that means your guy is a jerk sometimes, well, then your guy is a jerk. If it means the other guy does something good, well, he does something good. What's wrong with that?
You cannot have a meaningful dialogue about anything if you don't start from a position of truth.
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Vs the right who just makes crap up and puts in a few sound bites to confirm it.
Does that sound unfair too? Well it should. Comment like your use to be funny however we now live in a world where the president will troll news anchors in real time on twitter. And seems to be having a tendency of trusting tv news over the CIA and FBI.
There is news then there is commentary. We need to teach the people the difference as it is often blurred.
News: person x and y did this.
Commatary: person x was unjustified whil
Figure it out on your own, Bezos. (Score:5, Funny)
We're not doing your legwork for you.
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...and it'd point to articles on how actual news organisations do this
Nice try, except for the fact that those articles don't exist.
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Well, I could point you to quite a number of commercial and open-source projects designed to manage the kind of data that goes into news stories. Or mention that Django was developed in large part for news organizations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Django_(web_framework)). And that a quick query on a global search engine could turn up this and more.
But those facts are obviously alternative to your facts. So Fake, I guess.
Excel pivot tables (Score:4, Funny)
Excel spreadsheets tens of thousands of lines long.
Depends on what you mean by "keep track" (Score:5, Informative)
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I'm not sure if this is industry-specific enough (it probably isn't), but there is a CMS comparison matrix [cmsmatrix.org] which compares 1,300 Content Management Systems.
Novel idea here. (Score:4, Insightful)
Have you tried contacting and asking such an organization this very question?
Re:Novel idea here. (Score:4, Funny)
"Have you tried contacting and asking such an organization this very question?"
He asked the New York Times, but none of their +1500 reporters had time because each had a real news job to do.
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lol, this is "news" sites not "information".
Re: Novel idea here. (Score:2)
They lie about everything else, so you probably wouldn't get a true answer.
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They lie about everything else, so you probably wouldn't get a true answer.
Paranoid schizophrenic spotted. Proceed with caution.
He might try to push further conspiracy theories to you or force you to wear tinfoil on your head.
Some use Python/Django (Score:2)
Some tech, much brain (Score:5, Informative)
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Woo, had to scroll down FAR to find any mention of a CMS (content management system), but yes.
The closest I've ever worked for a news site was Disney, with the ESPN folks. They had bought go.com (formerly starwave.com, a Steve Ballmer venture capital spinoff from Microsoft). So they had some in-house thing in Java called GoPublish, which ran on Windows Server back in the day (they had just finished porting it to Linux when I left a few years ago), and all of the content was stored in Oracle DBs and indexe
Historically? LexisNexis... (Score:2)
When news organizations have needed to see what coverage existed on a subject in past decades at least, they'd find the guy who had access to LexisNexis and get some results from that.
At least that's what always comes up in inside-baseball discussions on news gathering stuff I've seen.
Ryan Fenton
Reuters and AP (Score:2)
Maybe there is someone else. These are wire services who publish a lot of the raw stories the other news organizations pick up and republish and pay to do so. If it's a really big story CNN and others will send their own reporters out.
I dunno, how do YOU keep track of information? (Score:2)
The questions seems weird to me. The media organizations I've been involved with have all gathered, filtered, and kept track of information using a loosely networked system of devices known as trained human brains. Much of information-gathering is subjective; there are many "pieces of information" that cross your desk each day which ultimately can and should be discarded, often because the "information" is simply inaccurate. I imagine it would be very difficult to train any kind of computer to make value ju
I know this space well (Score:1)
I know this space well. My consulting/integration company works with many, many media companies including the majors on this exact area. AMA? I've been doing this for 13 years, and literally work with many of the largest media companies on the planet.
There are two layers to the answer to this question. The first is storage and networking infrastructure, which is evolving very quickly for many reasons. Object storage, cloud (public/private/hybrid) -- all of these trends are having a massive impact on how the
I dunno (Score:3)
They just make it up. (Score:2)
Join SMPTE (Score:1)
Join SMPTE. Get articles from back issues of their "Motion Imaging Journal" that deal with IT in the production workplace. MOS, Media Object Server, is one of the key acronyms. SDI, Serial Digital Interface, is the specification for the video pipeline hardware in many installations.
MOS leads you to ENPS. Follow that down the rabbit hole to as much knowledge as most people would want if the motivation is only curiosity. The whole system is quite flexible and complex. (MOS is a relatively modest part of the g
Journalist here (Score:1)
Just thought the OP might be interested in an actual answer rather than endless ill-informed snark.
Obviously approaches vary between different organisations. When I worked at the BBC they used a system called ENPS - Electronic News Preparation System. It was developed by the Associated Press, and it was geared largely towards broadcast operations. It collated information from journalists on the ground, agency reports, broadcast scripts and contact information for sources and subjects. Over time, more and mo
They don't (Score:2)
They dont, it is very obvious these days that they are not as fantastic as one once thought.
The outsource it all (Score:2)
It is easy. They outsource it all. No, not to India. They just outsource it to the companies who then send them press releases. That is about 90% of the work done
The other 10% they copy and paste from Reuters.
Systemd? (Score:2)
That's a job for systemd, right?
Associated Press (Score:2)
Their editors scour the news agencies, like Associated Press for what they deem "news-worthy". These are standarized gateways, web api for importing purchased articles, which get pushed into local CMS, then manually, or half-automatically laid out. Duplicates are avoided through marking all purchases. If anything newsworthy is announced ahead of time, and the "higher ups" want something exclusive, reporters are send to provide own scoop - but great most of data comes from the agencies.
Generally, a reporter
Content management systems, of course (Score:2)
I do this for a living, so my answer is somewhat detailed.
Newspapers were using content management systems for this purpose beginning around 1970, before PCs. Previous to that, stories were transmitted electronically, stored on punch tape in a 6-bit format, but edited on paper and re-keyboarded as necessary.
If you wanted to use a story as-is, without editing, you could have a copyboy go find the right punch tape and hand-carry it to the typesetting department.
Computerizing the editing process/approval proce