The Washington Post’s
newly
launched
elections
engineering
team will establish a
computational political journalism R&D lab in the newsroom this
fall. Under the leadership of Jeremy Bowers, the team will collaborate
with Nick Diakopoulos, an assistant professor in communication studies
and computer science at Northwestern University, to experiment with
algorithmic and computational journalism tools to support The Post’s
political data efforts in advance of the 2020 election.
“We’re incredibly excited to kick off the R&D lab and create
novel tools to benefit our readers and our reporters, working with one
of the best political reporting teams in the business,” Bowers said.
“Nick’s experience in data-driven storytelling and automated analysis
puts him at the cutting edge of data science in journalism and we look
forward to his contributions as we position The Post as a leader in
computational political journalism.”
In addition to his role as assistant professor, Diakopoulos serves
as director of the Computational Journalism Lab (CJL) at Northwestern
where he works to better understand the efficiency and effectiveness of
computational story-discovery tools in domains ranging from
investigative and social journalism to computational fact-checking. He
is also a Tow Fellow at Columbia University School of Journalism, and
associate professor II at the University of Bergen Department of
Information Science and Media Studies. His research is in computational
and data journalism with emphases on algorithmic accountability and
social computing in the news. He is the author of “Automating the News:
How Algorithms are Rewriting the Media” from Harvard University Press,
and the co-editor of “Data-Driven Storytelling,” from CRC Press. He
received his Ph.D. in computer science from the School of Interactive
Computing at Georgia Tech, where he co-founded the program in
computational journalism.