Marple The Story Sniffer

Important results from the project

The purpose of the project is to develop a highly automated new service that helps newsrooms (and further on other organizations as well) find stories in large amounts of data. Using the developed algorithm we have developed a service, Newsworthy, that scans statistical time series and notifies the user when it finds journalistically interesting anomalies. The service utilizes the growing amount of open and public data with local newsrooms as the primary users. Dialogues are also initiated with other potential customers.

Expected long term effects

The goal has been to develop a service that is truly useful for newsrooms and other customers and that they are willing to pay for it. The service developed is still being testad by trial users and discussions are being initiated to seal deals with several customers. The process has taken longer than expected, but now a substantial amount of potential customers have started useing the service, which gives hope that the dialogues initiated can be converted into solid business. The service is still built on maximal automation to make it scalable and exportable to other countries.

Approach and implementation

Since the project has struggled with gaining acceptance for financing any type of activity within the program we cannot report on progress or effect contributions connected to such efforts. Positive effects of the parallell (unfinanced) efforts done in the hiatus of this process have been the pilot project with the Teachers´ Association (Lärarförbundet) which has ended with them being the first paying customer outside of journalism. The service has also been nominated as Innovation of the Year for the Data Journalism Award.