MediaFutures researchers in collaboartion with the Norwegian live sport service VG Live are working on a semi-automated pipeline that streamlines and simplifies the process of finding relevant social media content in collaboration.
Covering a sport event requires journalists to engage in many parallel time- and effort consuming activities: following the event, creating articles about it, providing the audience with pictures, comments, as well as with social media content. The semi-automated tool designed by research assistant Daniel Rosnes, under the supervision of professors Bjørnar Tessem and Fazle Rabbi, speeds up the process of extracting tweets that are pertinent to a given football match into the VG Live’s feed. The employment of the tool will allow for a more frequent display of social media posts created by users during a sport event, and give the journalists the opportunity to focus on other aspects of covering a match.
“In their current workflow, VG’s journalists manually search for social media posts to be embedded into the newsfeed that they generate as part of sports event coverage. The goal of this project was to create a prototype for a semi-automated tool that can collect, analyse, filter and present tweets that are relevant to the sport event that is being covered, and reduce the reporters’ workloads”, explains Rosnes.
Code of the tool can be found on our GitHub.
You can also watch a video demonstrating the tool:
VG Live
With about 2 million daily readers, Verdens Gang (VG) is Norway’s most read online newspaper. VG Live is the paper’s live service for football, where readers can find the latest updates from all the major leagues and cups in the world. VG Live provides one with an overview of what happens when the matches are played, minute by minute, and with comments from VG’s journalists covering the Norwegian elite series and English Premier League.
Photo credit: VG