FT’s Virtual Reality on time for the Rio 2016 Summer Olympics
The Financial Times is a sort of late comer to Virtual Reality, although never too late. The FT has selected the Rio 2016 Summer Olympic Games to showcase its Virtual Reality capabilities with a story that highlights Rio's favelas —the slums that encircle the magic city. The four-minute story is not all negative, as it does a good job of balancing how the story is presented, accentuating positives as well as the ills that still plague the poorest neighborhoods of Rio.
The FT’s four-minute VR film will go deep on the social dynamics and physical landscape of Rio’s favelas but in a way that shows the positives along with the negatives to create a balanced view of capital.
Natalie Whittle, deputy editor of FT Weekend, said the project has been an “amazing eye opener” into how to produce immersive journalism.
We look forward to seeing more of this type of VR storytelling in the FT as well as other media globally.
Take a look here
At The Washington Post: Rio and automated storytelling
All those facts about the Rio 2016 Summer Olympics game will be reported automatically for The Washington Post, with no need for sports department people to handle the numbers manually.
It is part of The Washington Post's experiment with artificial intelligence technology to report key information from the 2016 Rio Olympics, including results of medal events. “Heliograf,” which was developed in-house, automatically generates short multi-sentence updates for readers. These updates will appear in The Post’s live blog, on Twitter at @WPOlympicsbot, and are accessible via The Post’s Olympics skill on Alexa-enabled devices and The Post’s bot for Messenger.
Here is how the Post's Jeremy Gilbert, director of strategic initiatives at The Post, describes the effort:
“Automated storytelling has the potential to transform The Post’s coverage. More stories, powered by data and machine learning, will lead to a dramatically more personal and customized news experience. The Olympics are the perfect way to prove the potential of this technology. In 2014, the sports staff spent countless hours manually publishing event results. Heliograf will free up Post reporters and editors to add analysis, color from the scene and real insight to stories in ways only they can.”