This article comes from micro-channel public number: global network depth reports (ID: gijn_cn) , author: Lee striking, from the title figure: Oriental IC

News is a process of constantly chasing facts, and journalists are people who take the initiative and enjoy this information chasing process. This is of course extremely difficult and requires constant learning and training. But reporters are not people who like easy problems. In different countries and different languages, we have a commonality across countries and languages, and we all chase the most fundamental facts in our own world. After all, this is a group of people who have to break the casserole even if they take a sightseeing boat.

From September 26th to 29th, the 11th Global In-Depth Reporting Conference was held in Hamburg, Germany. Figure: Nick Jaussi / https: //nickjaussi.com

This year’s Global In-Depth Reporting Conference has a group event. The organizer rented a boat and invited some journalists to take a boat tour of Hamburg, Germany after the course. I signed up for the event, but I didn’t realize until the time of departure that the organizer had left an unusually vague meeting method: at the dock, find reporters and board the ship together.

Then the question is, at a dock full of tourists with different skin colors, different nationalities, and different languages, there are no conference markers on the scene. How can journalists from all over the world who have never met each other before? Do people find their own kind?

After arriving at the scene, I found that this was not difficult: Reporters are the most curious and informed people in this group. Although most of the people on the scene may be here for the first time in their lives, they are not the same as leisure tourists visiting with a mood of play, and reporters who have temporarily become tourists ca n’t help but quickly expand around. The investigation has been asking questions.

In the ten minutes waiting before sailing, we have clearly figured out when the ship will sail, when will the next ship leave, how many people will be able to get on board, when will the organizer charter the ship, How much does it cost to ship a boat, why does the ship departing at different times use different fuels, how much is the difference in operating costs of different fuels, how much money can tour boats make each year, and what are the profit and loss records …

This is a reporter. At that moment, I felt strongly that a reporter is a way of life, and you want to know more unconsciously.

The ship was my first friend that day, but the atmosphere on the ship was familiar. It was a rich evening. Not only was the night view of Hamburg, but also continuous information from reporters in different professional fields along the way. The operation of terminals in different countries, the differences between ports, and the impact of this year ’s China-US containers. Throughput changes … we also talked about our work, the courses we listened to the same day, and the tools we were using.

Elbe, Hamburg. Picture: Joey Qi

It is a common belief here to maximize the information and share it with more people. This is a way of life that exists throughout the world, and it presentsWe are different people with different skin colors, different races, different languages, and different personalities, but we are all approaching a common way of living in our own ways-living as a reporter.

This feeling runs through my entire journey in Hamburg. The 11th Global In-Depth Reporting Conference has a three-and-a-half-day schedule. I have filled up all the time. I met reporters of different styles one after another and a consistent common living method.

Most of the courses I choose are technology and tool related practice courses: data mining, web crawler toolbox practice, unstructured data processing, social media information mining, company financial statement analysis, and most AI related practice courses , Such as how to apply machine learning to news writing, how deep learning can assist reporters in reporting …

Here, I always unknowingly miss every day’s lunch because even the lunchtime sharing session is wonderful. The first day that made me forget about lunch was an afternoon workshop with the theme of “Can you Google this?” This was actually a game of finding information.

Speaker Marcus Lindemann asks everyone to solve the problem of escalating difficulty by searching-how many PDFs have the United Nations issued? How much of the PDF issued by the United Nations is used for conference presentations? For a celebrity name that is easy to misspell, how many reports missed his name? Which reports have never been right? The Australian Immigration Service rejected 6,229 people, but the official website of the government has set up files that are not detected by search engines. Then, please find the original Excel of this list of people …

Interestingly, many questions do n’t have the only correct answer. For example, most people use Google’s search syntax “filetype: PDF site: un.org” to get the result of the first question, but after that, the accuracy of the result depends on the analytical understanding of different people Already. Which PDFs are from the conference? Some people choose direct ideas and add keywords for conferences, conferences, and seminars, but some press conferences change their thinking and think about what words and sentences usually appear on the first and last pages of a PDF from a conference speech. Search for this specific content. The same person often uses the same last page, which is a human habit, so it can even help you accurately track the PDFs that a specific person posted on a specific platform.

In this process, the difference between reporters is a way of thinking, how to understand the problems we encounter, how to goFind a reasonable path to re-understand the world of your interviews. The key to solving a problem is not whether you have a specific tool, but whether you understand the key thinking to break through the problem and learn how to understand the facts.

How to understand the facts is fundamental to what I am pursuing as a journalist. It is also the motivation that drives me to continuously learn to master new technical tools.

I think journalism is an absolute relationship between you and the facts. The reporter can get information from the interview. How do you interpret the information you have, whether you trust the information you have obtained, whether you should fight against the existing understanding, look for a new supplementary evidence, to what extent the accuracy of the information is sought, and how much Category information can stop … These are the dilemmas that only journalists know. For me, the sense of crisis in this process is far greater than the sense of accomplishment.

The more complicated characters I have written, the deeper I feel. Humans are prisoners of their own limitations, and prisoners of their own inherent knowledge structure. Understanding the world is complicated, especially for those who understand the scene. Reporters need to be cautious and slightly negligent, even for small gaps in cognitive structure, misunderstanding, misunderstanding and misjudgment will occur. In the face of complex facts, your ability to understand and control information almost completely determines the depth and accuracy of your understanding of the facts, and it also affects the quality of your presentation of the facts.

At this conference, I met many fellows who used technology tools to combat this crisis. Everyone hopes to use Python, R language or reverse engineering, machine learning to assist reporting, help reporters to understand information more efficiently, Analyze the material.

My great joy is to meet my counterparts in practice. Before that, I could only explore the algorithm myself. Although professional engineers can help, they did not understand the exact needs of reporters in actual operation. At the conference, Technical journalists know each other’s difficulties, and this is a real business sharing. In an era of rapid technological advances, journalists can’t stay in the writing skills of the last century. We are facing far more information overload scenarios than before, so new tools should be used to help us.