Third International Workshop on Recent Trends in News Information Retrieval (NewsIR'19)

Abstract

The journalism industry has undergone a revolution in the past decade, leading to new opportunities as well as challenges. News consumption, production and delivery have all been affected and transformed by technology Readers require new mechanisms to cope with the vast volume of information in order to be informed about news events. Reporters have begun to use natural language processing (NLP) and (IR) techniques for investigative work. Publishers and aggregators are seeking new business models, and new ways to reach and retain their audience. A shift in business models has led to a gradual shift in styles of journalism in attempts to increase page views; and, far more concerning, to real mis- and dis-information, alongside allegations of "fake news" threatening the journalistic freedom and integrity of legitimate news outlets. Social media platforms drive viewership, creating filter bubbles and an increasingly polarized readership. News documents have always been a part of research on information access and retrieval methods. Over the last few years, the IR community has increasingly recognized these challenges in journalism and opened a conversation about how we might begin to address them. Evidence of this recognition is the participation in the two previous editions of our NewsIR workshop, held in ECIR 2016 and 2018. One of the most important outcomes of those workshops is an increasing awareness in the community about the changing nature of journalism and the IR challenges it entails. To move yet another step forward, the goal of the third edition of our workshop will be to create a multidisciplinary venue that brings together news experts from both technology and journalism. This would take NewsIR from a European forum targeting mainly IR researchers, into a more inclusive and influential international forum. We hope that this new format will foster further understanding for both news professionals and IR researchers, as well as producing better outcomes for news consumers. We will address the possibilities and challenges that technology offers to the journalists, the challenges that new developments in journalism create for IR researchers, and the complexity of information access tasks for news readers.