Today’s journalists are tasked with informing a public that is used to being entertained. News has to compete with the rest of the Internet, where good reporting often drowns in a sea of cat videos and click-bait. In this challenging landscape, news organizations have to adapt new strategies to keep readers, viewers, and listeners engaged. One strategy that has seen tremendous success in late-night television has been to embrace the dual role of journalist and entertainer, often by blending news with comedy. While effective at keeping audiences engaged, this strategy is difficult to scale — comedy, it turns out, is hard. Visual Beat will build tools that take audio/visual content curated by journalists, and transform it into alignment with music to create a song-and-dance like presentation. This editing device could be a powerful way to engage viewers and draw them to a story, without asking journalists to change the way they choose content. The Visual Beat team is led by Abe Davis and Sean Liu from Stanford Computer Science.
Visual Beat2017-2018
