Reporters and editors work in ways that are still largely tied to old print and broadcast models. Applying lessons from computer science can help make journalism more scalable, flexible and personalized. This panel will discuss developments such as object-oriented programming, model-view controller frameworks, database-driven Web applications and social code repositories -- and explore how these principles can be applied to journalism and create the future of storytelling. For example, making stories in an object-oriented mindset can help journalists work more efficiently, reusing and building on past work. Stories can be created as structured data that can be mashed up and viewed in more flexible ways by readers. Readers can get personalized stories that highlight what's new to them -- rather than having to read through what they already know to glean the latest news.
Burt Herman is co-founder and CEO of Storify, a platform for creating stories from social media, and founder of Hacks/Hackers, a worldwide organization bringing together journalists and technologists.
Herman previously worked as a journalist for a dozen years for The Associated Press. At the AP, he served as Korea bureau chief, founded a bureau covering the five countries of former Soviet Central Asia and reported on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, among other assignments worldwide. Herman was a 2008-9 Knight journalism fellow at Stanford University, where he also received a bachelor’s degree with honors in political science and master’s degree in Russian and Eastern European studies.
Jenny, who works with the Knight News Challenge, is a journalist focused on the frontier of news and information. At 24, she was one of the youngest reporters ever hired at The New York Times, where she worked for nine years and popularized the term "man date," one of the many reasons NPR called her a "conceptual scoop artist."
Jenny spends her time thinking about mapping, APIs, hackathons, open source infrastructure, start-ups, data visualization, accountability journalism.
She is one of the national organizers of Hacks/Hackers, an organization of journalists and technologists, helping it grow from two chapters to over 20 in six countries with 2,000 members. She spends a lot of her time on conference calls.
She is the author of "The Fortune Cookie Chronicles," an immensely popular book on Chinese food in America which showed fortune cookies were Japanese in origin. She is also a producer on the upcoming related documentary "The Search for General Tso" with Wicked Delicate, the team behind "King Corn."
She is also a member of the Nieman Foundation Advisory Board, and retired from the Poynter National Advisory Board after being one of its youngest members in history. She is chairperson of the Asian American Writers Workshop and a member of the New York Public Library Young Lions commitee.
Among her side projects are StreetPacman, and being a founding member of the food chapters of the Awesome Foundation.
She graduated from Harvard with a degree in applied math and economics. She has a purple hippo whose world travels can be seen at roaminghubba.com
As VP of Product and Technology, Trei leads the team that develops the SB Nation platform designed from the ground-up to deliver sports content and community for nearly 20 million passionate fans around the world.
Tristan is the CEO and Co-Founder of Apture, which helps publishers keep readers on their site by blending search directly into the page. Instead of highlighting text to search on Google, Apture let's users click a button to explore information in a second layer without leaving the site.
Rated #16 in Inc. Magazine's 30 under 30 Entrepreneurs of 2009, Tristan's career is marked by innovative technologies and interfaces that change the way we use computers. By the age of 20, Tristan filed his first patents around new information navigation interfaces. He is a Mayfield Fellow with the Stanford Technology Ventures Program in entrepreneurship, and frequently gives talks at major conferences and universities, including MIT’s Media Lab and at Stanford University. When not evangelizing Apture, he spends his time playing Yann Tiersen music on the piano and dancing Argentine Tango in San Francisco. He holds a BS in Computer Science from Stanford, with a focus in Human Computer Interaction.
Upendra Shardanand is the Chairman and CEO of Daylife, the leading media SaaS for the world's biggest media companies and consumer destinations. Daylife offers online publishers on-demand media and applications.
Mr, Shardanand co-founded his first venture, Firefly Network in 1995, as a spin-off of his work at the MIT Media Lab. Firefly was a pioneer in the areas of personalization and online communities. (Upendra’s graduate thesis developed on collaborative filtering, the recommendation technology now commonplace on the web). Firefly was acquired by Microsoft in 1998.
At Microsoft, Upendra launched Microsoft Passport, and worked on Microsoft’s privacy initiatives, serving on industry bodies to further the cause of online privacy. Following Microsoft, Upendra was a founding partner of The Accelerator Group, a venture firm with offices in New York, Los Angeles, and London. He went on to serve as the Director of Technology at AOL and then Time Warner Corporate.
Mr. Shardanand serves on the board of advisors for Treehugger, BrandKarma, Help Remedies, and BluWorld. Previously, Mr. Shardanand has served on the board of advisors to the Better Business Bureau Online, PeoplePC (acquired by EarthLink), MediaCode (acquired by Yahoo), RealNames, and InsightFirst (acquired by 24/7 RealMedia).
Mr. Shardanand received in 1994 a Masters of Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab.
