The crowdsourcing news network Vocativ is going to give VICE a run for its money. While HBO just renewed VICE (the TV series produced by Bill Maher) for Season 2, which will continue to star VICE CEO/on-camera journalist Shane Smith as he travels to Afghanistan and Greece to interview rebels, anarchists and fascists, Vocativ (now in beta) is developing technology that not only collects VICE-like stories (with vivid images and dramatic video) from “everyday people” but also evaluates the credibility of this information and the reliability of the sources in real-time. It’s “where Big Data and Journalism intersect.” That means Big Data has a big job to do. Historically, vetting sources has been a difficult task. (Aaron Sorkin writes whole episodes about this!)
So, who’s out to make “immersive” journalism more reliable than the VICE cacophony? Vocativ’s CEO Scott Cohen (former Digital Executive Editor at The Daily News) is leading a choice team of writers, editors, tech geeks, and politicos/pundits including: Senior Editor Ross Schneiderman (Newsweek, The Daily Beast, WSJ, NYT); VP of Product Elena Haliczer, (co-founder of Adaptive Semantics, a linguistic algorithm for automated comment moderation, which was acquired by The Huffington Post in 2010); Social Director Kate Gardiner (Al Jazeera, Voice of America, PBS NewsHour) and Vocativ’s latest acquisition: Editor-in-Chief Jim Impoco from Thomson Reuters Digital. Vocativ plans to launch soon on five platforms and across social media. For a sneak peak, check out their trailer which includes enticing interviews with French National Front member Marion Marechal-LePen and cricketer-turned-politican Imran Khan of Pakistan.