Refactoring the News - A Seminar with Jeffrey Greenberg

Event Date: 

Tuesday, February 28, 2017 - 2:00pm

Event Location: 

  • CITS Conference Room - SSMS 1310

“Fake News” is just the tip of the iceberg. The News has been outpaced by recent technological innovations. As a product it is not a category that excites a lot of investment. For years, revenue at most newspapers has been falling. Increasingly they are pressured to generate revenue by focusing on ‘engagement’, while their focus on improving on their core product offering, truth, has wavered. At best, they focus on innovations in distribution, opening their paywalls to social media, and innovating on reader experiences with interactive content.  Though their product is supposed to be a useful tool for truth-seeking and evidence-grounded decision making, it has instead been gamed by anyone who can afford a cable channel, or who for less money can create a web-page or post a tweet.
In this talk, Greenberg  broadly reconsiders the product and processes of the News, from sourcing through distribution, with an eye to making it both more robust and compelling to stand up in the face of significant technologies in play.  Starting with the assertion that the news ‘article’ is ‘dead’, he proposes some guides for replacing it with more useful conveyances. He will propose a news ‘substrate’ that provides a (more) solid ground where the underpinnings of fact and assertion are clearer. The aim is to articulate the components of a refactored News, including not only product guidelines but some of the particular technologies and explorations needed to concretely make this a reality.

Jeffrey Greenberg has a degree in Bioengineering and Performance Art from UCSD. Currently, Vp of Engineering at PeerWell.co, where he is focused on improving outcomes of surgeries and other treatments, he has patents in ultrasound imaging, and voice recognition applications. With a history of product and deep technology innovation in such diverse areas as medicine and diagnostic imaging, social media, telephony, operating systems, and games, he aims to work on technology for doing good. Combining experiences at Bell Labs, working on AI, and edge technology together with an Art and culture focus ( including NEA, NYSCA, and foundation grants) he has a history of finding areas that matter and advancing the state-of-the-art.

This talk is co-hosted by the MAT seminar series and CITS.