On April 8th, begins “Breaking Europe”, an online programme in which journalists Rudi Vranckx and Yassine Atari visit different European cities and ask inhabitants about European themes such as migration, the climate and youth unemployment. To allow as many young Europeans as possible to share their opinions and at the same time to support the editorial team with the processing of the material, the team of VRT Innovation built a “chat box”, a mobile booth with an innovative video captioning system. This technology was developed by VRT Innovation as part of the European MOS2S project, in order to let more people share their story in media productions and in journalism.
The “chat box”: crowd journalism throughout Europe
With the mobile “chat box”, the editorial team from Vranckx is able to ask Europeans in an efficient way and in their own language about important themes. The editorial team is able to ask open, as well as closed questions, and process the answers in different creative formats. The recording is taken in the booth itself and completed with available metadata. This way, the editorial team is able to import the videos in a fast and simple way for post-production.
The “chat box” is the result of several insights made during the charity event Music for Life. The innovation team looked there for new concepts in order to collect as many stories as possible. At the same time, the team also developed solutions for the editorial team to smoothly process a great deal of video material.
End pilot of European project MOS2S
The collaboration with Vranckx is part of the end pilot of the European research project MOS2S on crowd journalism, led by VRT Innovation. There, the project team defined two questions: “How can we support people to share their stories via audiovisual means?” and “How can a media company filter and integrate all this live content in a production?”. Together with Flemish partners as Kiswe and Nokia Bell Labs, but also foreign partners among which TNO (The Netherlands), ETRI (South Korea), Gerade Software (Turkey), KoçSistem (Turkey) and Newsbridge (France), the team worked on innovations in mobile user generated content, automatic metadata and analyses based on artificial intelligence. With “Breaking Europe”, VRT Innovation finishes the project after three years and helped build new technologies to support community storytelling.
You are able to find the stories of Vranckx starting from the 8thof April on Youtube, in Het journaal and Terzake, on VRTNWS.be, Stubru.be and VRTNU.be.
You can read the press release here.