using structured journalism to take the story off your site

[Alan Bushnell]

I'm the developer of a browser extension that I thought would be of interest to this group.  Its called thinkContext and it is able to display arbitrary data associated with an entity (person, company, etc) when the user encounters them on the web.  

For example, one of our data sources is Politifact.  When a user visits the website or social media page or they come up in a search engine, they'll see the last few statements Politifact has vetted, how many statements are true, false, etc and (perhaps most importantly) a link to the Politifact profile page.  To identify entities we use what Politifact indicates is the homepage plus a semi-automated process of resolving to Wikipedia entries which allows us to bring in the social media information.

The idea is to connect with users while they are already doing what they normally do on the web.  They don't have to make a conscious effort to visit your site, instead the stories on their site find them if its contextually relevant.  You can imagine things like a local newspaper's restaurant reviews appearing on Yelp pages. or stories about politicians appearing on their websites.

As you can see from our website we've taken a social justice POV with the data sources we offer, however, the code is freely available and I'd love to work with any journalists who would find this kind of tool useful.

http://thinkcontext.org/

https://github.com/thinkcontext/Think-Context

[Burak Arikan]

Dear Allen, 

I've installed and started using thinkcontext plugin, thanks for your effort. 

It would be great to extend this plugin with new data sources from civic data initiatives who systematically watch, gather, and publish data about a variety of issues internationally. I wrote an article about it sometime ago: 

Civic Data Initiatives

https://medium.com/graph-commons/civic-data-initiatives-c4a0f40d9a23

Best,

Burak