Data Aggregation The Next Big Thing For WSJ Graphics Team

Who goes to work thinking how to put himself out of work? The Wall Street Journal’s graphics editor Jovi Juan says that’s what gets him up every morning.

Juan who oversees the graphics design team of the Wall Street Journal’s online edition says: “We are spending more time designing simple software for reporters to do graphics themselves instead of having us do it for them,” so that his team can be freed up to start build the next big thing: data aggregation.

But after three years on the job, Juan is nowhere closer to the goal.

The problem is not the technology. Over the years, the team has built an photo editor software called “cropper”, a simple gadget that lets reporters who want to post photos with their online posts crop the photos to a standardized size and pixel for the WSJ.com. Another software Chart Builder was created for reporters to build flash. “We've made it a lot easier to use, but a number of reporters do not want to learn it.”

He said it is the toughest part of moving forward: the old mindset. But majority of the reporting team would eventually have to move on. And only then can Jovi's 8-person team start to aggregate Dow Jones data and make it sharable.

Eventually, everyone will be able to access to the data and visualize it. The idea is to build WSJ's own Many Eye program, an online data visualization tool.

Two or three years down the road, there is a distinctive possibility to get paid through WSJ's data site, Juan says.

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The Big Money After A Year

When Slate.com decided to start a new business site, The Big Money, it couldn't have picked a more ominious start date: Sept. 15, 2008, the day that Lehman Brothers, one of the biggest American banks, collapsed. A year later, James Ledbetter, the site's editor-in-chief, can only marvel at the timing and consider one big question: Will the The Big Money ever make money?

The site had orginally plan to launch as general interest business news site, but changed gears to focus much more on the market crash. Today, readers will see a site that has made yet one more turn---to its original plans, covering more technology and social media. As a result, AIG articles have given way to Google stories. Apple's advertising strategy led the home page recently. The Web site also stepped up its effort to adopt social media itself. In the first week of December, the fans of its Facebook fan page has nearly tripled.

Recently, it also launched The Big Money Facebook 50, a ranking of the brands that are currently making the best use of Facebook. The Web site plans to make the list an annual feature, its own verision of the Fortune 500 but for companies that are social media savvy. “I think it will turn into something like that, but the difference is our list is more subjective,” said Ledbetter.

Indeed, the Big Money list uses various metrics—including fan numbers, page growth, frequency of updates, creativity as determined by a panel of judges, and fan engagement—to decide the ultimate rank on the list, according to the explanation on the site. Readers can send in suggestions and comments on how to rank the list, too, either through its Facebook fan page or directly from the Web site.

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A Tin For News

It wasn't a business Newstin planned to get into originally. But an incident turned out to have become a service that endeavors to provide Internet news readers the first experience in global news reading.

Using its patented Cross Language Data Retrieval technology, Newstin started its business in 1998 to create IT solutions for business clients. But the technology's great potential in arranging all types of online information inspired its business development director Jeremy Lopez to use it to organize Internet news.

"We've enabled our readers to get news tailored to their unique needs. It goes beyond key words search," said Lopez, who joined Newstin in 2006 to start this global news aggregation project. For example, a reader can type in a search phrase such as “technology” and the site is able to pull out stories not only contain the key word “technology,” but related articles on IT and inventions.

Newstin subscribers can search for stories on selected topics retrieving from hundreds of thousands of sources from around the world such as the U.S., Czech, and China. The Web site pulls in stories from main stream media, blogs and press releases from each country and list them either by relevance or time. What's better: Everything is free.

Newstin also encourages its members to play an active role in the site. Any member can suggest new sources to the existing 700,00 categories. New sources are subject to be reviewed by the Newstin editorial team before being added to the list. But the result of this Wikipedia-like approach is a soaring number of sources. As of today, the site has 15,000 sources from around the globe and it is growing daily.

The concern of the ever-growing online sources including blogs is their viability. “Every moment, all the data has been piled. But to determine the authority of the sources is one of the most difficult thing,” Alan Mutter, an independent media investor and veteran media watcher.

The key word is “reliability”. For that, Newstin seems to have some way to go. “Its content stretches too widely that it's not clear to me whose needs it is serving,” said Mutter. “It needs to be more focused.”

Advertising A Hope For The Big Money

James Ledbetter, editor of The Big Money, says reader involvement remains a central mission for the site. With that open-arm attitude, the site's traffic has responded positively, with 6.8 million unique visitors globally, according to Quantcast, a service that tracks online metrics.

Critics, however, doubt whether traffic means bucks for The Big Money. "I believe it has readers since it offers interesting stories," said Alan Mutter, an independent media investor and a veteran media executive. “But the question is whether it is attracting advertising and able to become self sustainable.”

Such concerns have definitely hit home; last year, two big advertisers, American Express and Infinity Ads, pulled out. “That just said how bad our advertising industry has became in the crisis,” said Ledbetter. Later in the year, the Web site re-established relationship with American Express to cooperate video projects on the site. Dell, meanwhile, exclusively sponsors its current Facebook 50 list project.

Still, The Big Money relies financially on its mother company, the Slate Group. “We are very dependent on the network to get advertising. Without Slate, there is no Big Money,” Ledbetter said. In the next few years, the Web site's revenue might not grow big enough to self sustain, but its editorial group believes advertising is going to become the main revenue stream in a long term. And that, Ledbetter believes, relies largely on the quality of content. "Yes, we will be irreverent if we need to be,” said Ledbetter. “As long as its witty and intelligent, and continues to attract advertising.”

Translation Is The Bottleneck For News Aggregators

Started with six staff in Prague, capital city of Czech Republic, in 1998, Newstin.com was initially funded privately by its CEO and founder, Frank Vrabel, and a group of angel investors, affluent individuals who provide capital for business startups. Right now, it is in the process of a new round of fund raising, according to Lopez. And it is also in talks with advertising agency Double Click (http://www.doubleclick.com) for partnership.

The site provides English translation from ten languages such as Spanish, Japanese, and Arabic. For many Web sites, language is the barrier in creating a global online community. Even Facebook has language limitations. Its members have to speak the same language to be able to communicate. "We are jumping across these differences to lay a foundation to interconnect all the editions," Lopez said.

But media experts say the site still faces challenges. Besides being able to further verify its sources, the other challenge is its translation quality, a universal bottleneck for translation services.

The site uses Lingual World (http://www.lingual-world.com/), a third party translation services. Based on a recent poll, readers are generally happy with the translation, Lopez said. But translations between certain languages are tougher. "It's much harder to use machines to translate from Chinese into English," Lopez said. "But you get the gist of the story."

Critics doubt whether readers are getting the accurate gist because even Google's translation tool is said to be distorting the meanings of the original languages.

The next big thing for the team of 30 in central Europe is to build an interactive platform for readers to leave comments on the site. Translation to English will also be available to enable readers around the world to read comments in different languages and communicate with each other.

In the past two years, Newstin staff grew from six to 30. It also opened its first international office in Silicon Valley of San Francisco.

Industry watchers think the site has its fingers on the problem. But it will take a long time to solve it. Whoever figures out how to build a fast, convenient, and reliable way to find what readers want will have a successful business.