Civic Intelligence: How news organizations can use BI & AI to Move Beyond the Static Infographic & Make Millions in the Process

Infographics are great to clearly and concisely communicate often complex concepts visually. And while a well-crafted static visualization is truly worth a thousand words, an Interactive infographic/dashboard is worth 10,000!

Unfortunately, today:

• Data journalism tends to be the province of the few self-trained geeks in the news rooms comfortable with Excel, Access & Tableau.
• The overwhelming majority of infographics are static charts and maps that lack drill-down or other interactive/personalization capabilities so users can’t easily explore and understand how the issue impacts them.

The good news is, the ultra-competitive $18-billion-and-growing-analytics market:

1. Is bringing more powerful and easier to use tools to the market to help transform data into visual stories.
2. Is making it easier to deploy not just static charts but interactive applications to the cloud so that users can both see high-level trends and drill-down/explore to find personalized insights.
3. Needs new marketing channels to highlight the capabilities of their solutions and differentiate themselves against the competition.

These three trends present huge opportunities for news organizations to:

1. Leverage business intelligence tools that incorporate artificial intelligence, smart data discovery and natural language generation to deliver better insights/civic intelligence to their audience with less work and training required.
2. Drive audience engagement with their brand because users can explore and personalize the information themselves instead of just viewing a static image.
3. Avoid your text being copied and monetized elsewhere, since users have to come to their site to interact with the application.
4. Accelerate their journey toward becoming software/solution providers instead of just content providers.
5. Potentially reap tens of millions of dollars and get assistance from software companies interested in showing off their products’ capabilities to millions of potential customers.

Delivering civic intelligence

The BI Bakeoff at the Gartner Analytics summit this March really highlighted the opportunity to apply artificial-intelligence and business- intelligence software to deliver civic intelligence.

Cindi Howson, the BI Bakeoff  & Scorecard queen, had the software vendors analyze Department of Transportation data to understand what’s drove the spike in 2016 traffic accident deaths.

The demos demonstrated the ability of how data journalists can use today’s BI tools to create and publish interactive visualizations and stories. And how artificial intelligence will enable even non analysts to identify key correlations and outliers with very limited training and work.

Check out Cindi’s blog for links to either videos or actual “dashboards” to explore the different capabilities and insights each provider discovered.

While all of the dashboards could have been more user friendly, they all gave great insight and the ability to personalize the information by state or other variable that might be of interest. The two that you can actually play with are:

• Tableau: They created the most intuitive and visually pleasing story
• Microsoft’s Power BI: I really liked how they embedded an Interactive car Infographic as part of the overall story.

For large organizations looking to figure out who to partner with and understand market trends, Cindi’s incredibly detailed knowledge of all the major’s vendors platforms, is probably worth the cost of the Gartner subscription alone. For those on a budget, you can always find a free version of the Gartner BI scorecard to get some insights about the different players in the market.

Show me the money!

The conference also highlighted how competitive the fast growing the $18 billion market is, and the potential opportunities news organizations have to partner with different vendors looking to show off their products’ capabilities.

After all, what better advertisement is their than for vendor’s potential customers to interact with an online information app on their favorite news site that is powered by IBM, Microsoft, Tableau, SAS, etc.. Today IT vendors pay millions of dollars to sponsor sports and other events that don’t even show off their capabilities. Imagine, what it would be worth for them to put their product in the hands of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands or even millions of users.

My guess is that for organizations like CNN, the New York Times or the Washington Post, this could be worth tens of millions of dollars annually. And for news organizations, it’s a way to deliver better value to your advertisers and audience. In fact, I bounced this idea off a few vendors and their eyes lit up at the potential.

The future is so bright

But in order to take advantage of it, news organizations and journalists will need to think differently and:

1. Embrace their roles as technology companies providing civic intelligence and engagement solutions.
2. Leverage the cloud and modern BI tools to move beyond the static infographic.
3. Partner with cash-rich software companies for money and expertise to improve their value proposition and bottom line.