Nieman Foundation at Harvard
HOME
          
LATEST STORY
Why “Sorry, I don’t know” is sometimes the best answer: The Washington Post’s technology chief on its first AI chatbot
ABOUT                    SUBSCRIBE
July 16, 2015, 2:33 p.m.
Reporting & Production
LINK: www.washingtonpost.com  ➚   |   Posted by: Shan Wang   |   July 16, 2015

How the Islamic State is leaving tech companies torn between free speech and security is a labyrinthine topic. To fully understand it, readers should probably already have a good grasp on the spread of the Islamic State on social media, past acts of terror such as the 2013 Westgate Shopping Mall attack in Nairobi or the shooting at the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris, and even just how social media works.

Today’s 8,000-word-plus story on the subject, part of The Washington Post’s “Confronting the Caliphate” series, comes with the background knowledge and context right in the story itself:

caliphate-context-screenshot

The feature, which the Post calls a Knowledge Map, appears as highlighted links and buttons within the story, allowing readers to click on and then read a brief overview of relevant topics like “Anti-Islamic State activism” or “James Foley.”

“We wanted to experiment with providing background information as a user reads a story to help bring context to a complicated topic, and we designed Knowledge Map to work in a way that would not interrupt the reading experience,” the Post’s director of digital strategy Sarah Sampsel said in a press release. “Knowledge Map makes reading the news a more personalized experience, giving readers access to additional information as they need or want it.”

Screenshot knowledge map on mobileThe feature works on mobile, too: click on a highlighted link, and a window opens within the page that a reader can then exit out of without leaving the story page.

For now, Knowledge Map is still a small-scale test, appearing only on this one story. But the Post eventually hopes to apply data mining to personalize the reading experience further for its readers.

“This iteration sets us up to use data mining techniques to identify and surface contextual content for our readers,” the Post’s engineering director for data science Sam Han said in its announcement about Knowledge Map today. “Our ultimate goal is to mine big data to surface highly personalized and contextual data for both journalistic and native content.”

Show tags
 
Join the 60,000 who get the freshest future-of-journalism news in our daily email.
Why “Sorry, I don’t know” is sometimes the best answer: The Washington Post’s technology chief on its first AI chatbot
“For Google, that might be failure mode…but for us, that is success,” says the Post’s Vineet Khosla
Browser cookies, as unkillable as cockroaches, won’t be leaving Google Chrome after all
Google — which planned to block third-party cookies in 2022, then 2023, then 2024, then 2025 — now says it won’t block them after all. A big win for adtech, but what about publishers?
Would you pay to be able to quit TikTok and Instagram? You’d be surprised how many would
“The relationship he has uncovered is more like the co-dependence seen in a destructive relationship, or the way we relate to addictive products such as tobacco that we know are doing us harm.”