Introducing Social Semantic Journalism

Abstract

In the event of breaking news, a wealth of crowd-sourced data, in the form of text, video and image, becomesavailable on the Social Web. In order to incorporate this data into a news story, the journalist mustprocess, compile and verify content within a very short timespan. Currently this is done manually andis a time-consuming and labour-intensive process for media organisations. This paper proposes SocialSemantic Journalism as a solution to help those journalists and editors. Semantic metadata, natural languageprocessing (NLP) and other technologies will provide the framework for Social Semantic Journalismto help journalists navigate the overwhelming amount of UGC for detecting known and unknown newsevents, verifying information and its sources, identifying eyewitnesses and contextualising the event andnews coverage journalists will be able to bring their professional expertise to this increasingly overwhelminginformation environment. This paper describes a framework of technologies that can be employed byjournalists and editors to realise Social Semantic Journalism.