The next wave in news technology

Technology is changing everything. Maybe this is one of the most frequently repeated sentences of the modern times. We are constantly in awe of news about new technologies or new applications of older technologies. This is such a strong trend that advertising agencies like R/GA has full-time positions for technology editors to keep the rest of the staff up to date about technological breakthroughs that are happening constantly. 

The news industry is definitely one of the major industries on which technology has paramount effects. 
We all witnessed how social media outlets changed the way we get news. 

Now a second major technology wave is hitting the news rooms. 

According to Wired, Google has an application that is going to change the rules of the news reporting for good and it is called Montage. 

Montage was built by Google’s human rights-focused tech incubator Jigsaw (until recently known as Google Ideas) to sort, map, and tag video evidence from conflict zones. Over the last few months, it allowed six Carter Center analysts to categorize video footage coming out of Syria -identifying government forces and each of the many armed opposition groups, recording the appearance of different armaments and vehicles, and keeping all of that data carefully marked with time stamps and locations to create a searchable, sortable and mappable catalog of the Syrian conflict. “Some of our Montage investigations have had over 600 videos in them,” says McNaboe. “Even with a small team we’ve been able to go through days-worth of video in a relatively short amount of time.”

This is brilliant because up until now, real editors were having a difficult time finding trustworthy content. We have all seen careers tarnished by believing in unchecked social media stories over and over again the past years. With the help of Montage, the quickness and the localness of the social media outlets is met with the verification processes of real journalists. 

I believe that from this point on, we will be able to hear more real time and correct news much more frequently than before.