Career Tips from Alumni: Documentary Film Production with Vincent Du
4 February 2013
JMSC Students Published Widely during Internships
8 February 2013

Video: Public Talk – Computer Science and Journalism

Jonathan Stray, the Overview Project lead for the Associated Press in New York and an alumnus of the JMSC’s Master of Journalism programme, discusses the increasing number of ways that computer science and journalism intersect.

While the two cultures have different traditions and at first glance seem to be filled with contradictions and misunderstandings, Stray says that the stereotypes are wrong and there is a lot of common ground. “At the core of journalism, there’s something about representing ideas to the public, and about enforcing accountability”, says Stray. “But engineers, and computer scientists, and statisticians want to do that too”.

It is important to build even more bridges between computer science and journalism in order to gather information, sift through data, and be able to discover stories and present them to an audience successfully in the digital age says Stray.

His talk highlights the areas of journalism where the techniques of computer science are becoming as essential as they are useful.

This presentation, “Computer Science and Journalism: Two Great Tastes That Taste Great Together“, was given at the JMSC’s Digital Media Lab on Monday, February 4, 2013. Please click on the video below to watch the full lecture.

Stray has been in Hong Kong for the past month teaching the JMSC’s first Computational Journalism class. He was the AP’s Interactive Technology Editor from 2010 to 2012. Prior to this, he was a freelance journalist in Hong Kong, and a senior computer scientist for Adobe Systems. His articles have appeared in Wired, The New York Times, Foreign Policy, and China Daily.

Stray is on Twitter at @jonathanstray and blogs at jonathanstray.com/.