From Redlining to Robots: How newsrooms apply
            technology to the craft of journalism

                                                     Aron Pilhofer
                                                   Temple University
                                                     United States



                                                                 Biography
                                                                 Aron Pilhofer is the James B. Steele Chair in Journal-
                        Abstract
                                                                 ism Innovation at Temple University. In addition to
    The use of technology in newsrooms is noth-                  teaching, his work is focused on new business models,
    ing new: Journalists have been applying so-                  digital transformation and innovation in news. Before
    phisticated data analysis techniques to find                 joining Temple, Pilhofer was executive editor, digital,
    and tell stories for at least a half century.                and interim chief digital officer at the Guardian in
    In 1972, journalists at the Philadelphia In-                 London. There, he led the Guardian’s product and
    quirer borrowed time on a mainframe to land                  technology teams as well as heading visual journal-
    a story about unequal sentencing. In 1989, the               ism - including pictures, graphics, interactive and data
    Atlanta Journal Constitution’s series about                  journalism. Before coming to the Guardian, Aron was
    redlining won a Pulitzer Prize – the first for               associate managing editor for digital strategy and ed-
    a piece of data journalism. And in the after-                itor of interactive news at The New York Times. He
    math of Hurricane Andrew in 1992, the Miami                  also was a reporter at Gannett newspapers in New
    Herald used GIS to show how shoddy work-                     Jersey and Delaware, headed data journalism at the
    manship — not wind — was likely to blame                     Center for Public Integrity in Washington, D.C. and
    for much of the damage. Although journalism                  served on the training staff of Investigative Reporters
    isn’t thought of as a high-tech profession, jour-            and Editors. Outside the newsroom, Aron co-founded
    nalists have been among the earliest adopters                two news-related startups: DocumentCloud.org, now
    of new techniques and technologies to find and               housed at Temple University’s Klein College of Media
    report stories. This talk will cover how jour-               and Communication, and Hacks & Hackers.
    nalists have embraced technology in the past,
    and how they might in the future.




Copyright c 2019 for the individual papers by the papers’ au-
thors. Copying permitted for private and academic purposes.
This volume is published and copyrighted by its editors.
In: A. Aker, D. Albakour, A. Barrón-Cedeño, S. Dori-Hacohen,
M. Martinez, J. Stray, S. Tippmann (eds.): Proceedings of the
NewsIR’19 Workshop at SIGIR, Paris, France, 25-July-2019,
published at http://ceur-ws.org