About

Alert Data Journalism is a tool to connect journalists to the open data sources in cities they are covering. By automating the collecting and preliminary analysis of data for newsworthiness the tool cuts down on the manual work a journalist must do in order to create stories and insights from data.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is connecting more and more devices to the web and providing rich open data sources. The analysis of these data sources is currently cumbersome and labour intensive for journalists.

Alert Data Journalism allows journalists to set their own parameter values for the thresholds at which the tool notifies them of data trends. In this way the human journalist's news judgment and the tool's data processing work together in a human-machine partnership that provides smart insights when newsworthy events occur.

By allowing journalists full control over their alerts the tool can also provide a steady stream of data for live reporting of news events, for example a train strike. If there is a strike on the Dublin Area Rapid Transit (DART) train service for example, a journalist could lower the alert parameters for the analysis of the Dublin Bikes Scheme, and then report in real-time on the increased use of public rental bikes due to the trains being out of service.

Alerts are fully integrated with Twitter, meaning a journalist can monitor live delays or usage rates among other metrics from scraped data using Tweetdeck or even the Twitter mobile app.

This means there is no need for a journalist to have to regularly check email or a dedicated application while using the service, saving vital time when covering a live event.

Contact us to request access to real-time alerts from data sources the tool is currently analysing. Examples of the types of data the tool is analysing are available in the Services section.