Covid Wire

While the coronavirus pandemic is global, its impact is felt locally. As the battle with COVID-19 rages on, having access to trustworthy, accurate, and local information is becoming a matter of life and death for communities across the U.S. With local news outlets continuing to close, and the proliferation of misinformation on social media, many American towns and cities lack a meaningful source of essential information.

Covid Wire is a news aggregator focused on delivering up-to-date information around COVID-19.

Going forward, we plan to develop an open-source news aggregator platform that can be deployed in any humanitarian crisis around the world. This includes, but is not limited to, local pandemics, natural disasters, and political uprisings. Any organization will be able to deploy a customized news platform for their relevant focus, and deploy a first-response information infrastructure versionmuch like of the first responders of Doctors Without Borders.

As the battle with COVID-19 rages on, having access to trustworthy, accurate, and local information is becoming a matter of life and death. With local news outlets across the U.S. continuing to close, and the proliferation of misinformation on social media, many American towns and cities - sometimes entire counties - lack a meaningful source of essential information.

Some of the most critical guidance right now is highly localized: Where can I go to get tested? Can my kids still get free or reduced-price meals while schools are closed? Which grocery stores are open? Yet since 2004, nearly 1,800 local newspapers have shuttered in the U.S., and more recently, Fifty-seven percent of counties that have reported cases of COVID-19 lack a daily newspaper. Additionally, the volume of content and questionable moderation policies of existing social media platforms, such as Twitter, not only make it seemingly impossible to find important information around COVID-19 but also call into question the validity of the information itself. In fact, a recent study found that bots have been spreading more than 100 types of inaccurate COVID-19 stories, such as information about unproven "cures."

Covid Wire is a curated news aggregator that provides real-time updates on the most important changes affecting your local community, so that you can stay informed and make rational decisions.

Users:
Readers can search for local information via their zipcode, to learn about hospital wait times, the current state of infrastructure and utilities, and take actions according to municipality rules. Quickly learn what's happening to your neighborhood and plan decisions on the available local resources knowing you are informed to the best of your abilities.

Site infrastructure:

Covid Wire employs a mix of machine learning to crawl the web for COVID-19 related content from reputable publications, and a team of human moderators to further curate the selection of content into the most relevant news. We are a team of 11+ volunteers across from engineer, design, journalism, and product. Using a series of machine learning algorithms, we are able to scrape news articles from reputable news and summarize them in a series of live feed updates. Our moderation platform allows volunteer moderators to screen certain news postings that require additional review before releasing to the news feed aggregator.

We are focused on impacting the most heavily affected communities in the United States that do not have ready access to clear, direct, local information about their neighborhoods. Particularly we look at people are concerned about getting up to date information, but may not have knowledge or the time to locate all the scattered local information that's distributed across various social media channels, municipal websites, and local news. 

In the midst of a pandemic, local journalism is experiencing a crisis. Since 2004, nearly 1,800 local newspapers have shuttered in the U.S., and more recently, fifty-seven percent of counties that have reported cases of COVID-19 lack a daily newspaper. Local communities are at risk when they do not have access to reliable information that can direct them to the public services and infrastructure that they desperately need. Benefits include:

1. Reduce reliance on strained healthcare systems
2. Support municipalities & social services in distributing critical information
3. Aggregation of important news and filtering of misinformation campaigns that plague social media.

Compared to existing news platforms that cater to a broad community of users, Covid Wire focuses on providing topical and localized information that accurate not just by geolocation but also on the order of relevance. Whereas local news may also cross publish generalized syndicated information, Covid Wire focuses on local COVID-19 information and filters out extraneous opinions or emotionally charged content.

Our machine learning algorithm reviews a preset list of publication sources and crawls each publisher site for articles related to COVID-19. The multi-classifier reviews the article to ensure relevance (e.g. is about park openings, store availability, etc) before pre-approving it in a queue. The moderation platform is a human-powered platform that then editorializes the screened subset of articles to ensure that the right articles are being published. Once final approval is given by a human moderator the articles is then pushed to the public-facing website. This machine-human hybridization approach ensure that news is efficiently reviewed for time-critical information such as COVID-19, other types of pandemics, or political uprisings. 

Please review www.covidwire.news and read content on roBERTa machine learning models.

The future of local journalism is in immediate danger of extinction. The existing publisher business models have failed to support the livelihood of local journalists, creating pockets of news deserts across communities in need within the United States. While Covid Wire is an immediate local journalism solution for distributing critical information on Coronavirus, the long term implication of a platform tool to support local journalism is a clear opportunity. To that end, we have filed as a nonprofit organization, The Local News Project, and intend to utilize the tools we have developed as a long term news technology platform. The Local News Project is a non-profit organization dedicated to encouraging access to essential information and news for local American communities, and leveraging modern technology tools to bridge gaps in local news infrastructure. We believe these tools will not only give local journalists a voice to speak up, but also to help local communities stay connected in, and participate in the journalism process.

You can read additional articles on the urgency of local news: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/27/magazine/coronavirus-colorado-unemployment-jobs.htm

https://www.usnewsdeserts.com/reports/expanding-news-desert/

Serving now:

11.8 million (Greater Seattle and San Francisco Regions)

1 year from now:

328 million (pop United States)

5 years from now:

2 billion in 5 years

Within the next year, we aim for every local community in the U.S. to have access to Covid Wire.

to have a real-time news platform for local COVID-19 news in every community across the United States, aimed at actively engaging members who are hungry for information but have challenges in finding or locating the appropriate level of clarity across scattered media channels. Our algorithm will provide support for our local moderation team that we hope to expand for every city within the US. Longer term over a 5 year period, we plan to expand the technology platform to provide local news coverage for every American community.

Currently, we are a team of 13 part-time volunteers distributed across the U.S. To ensure the development of this project continues, we will need to financial resources to hire full time employees to develop the project further. Asides from fundraising efforts we also face news publication challenges in partnerships. 

Currently a team of 15 volunteers work on developing Covid Wire. 

Our team is a unique blend of experienced journalists, engineers, designers and strategists who have a strong passion for improving journalistic reach in local communities. This includes team members, such as the former founding editor of Apple News, machine learning engineers from silicon valley, and designers from top consultancies in the world.

You can review a sample of our team's bio here: https://www.notion.so/covidwire/8b44c95778cd4a61aa1590ab3f458d08?v=db69966883e949e7bfd58b4a259aa518

Covid Wire currently does not have existing partnerships at this time, but aims to expand reach with strategic journalism and financing partners in the near future.

Currently a team of 15 volunteers work on developing Covid Wire. 

In the short term our financial stability will rely on tax-exempt donations to our non-profit organization, investor funds for those with an interest in news and information access, as well as grants from foundations. Over the long run we plan on incorporating paid features that provide improved personalization and added value that will bring in sustained revenue for the organization. Partnerships with governments and publications will also provide shared revenue streams.

MIT Gates Foundation

Sloan Foundation

Institute for Nonprofit News

Google News Lab

Knight Foundation

We are interested in partnering with organizations that can provide funding and resources, whether technology focused or experts who have a vested interest in expanding public access to knowledge and information on a local, community-driven scale.

Potential partners include:

• MIT Gates Foundation
• Sloan Foundation
• Institute for Nonprofit News 
• Google News Lab 
• Knight Foundation

Covid Wire and the news platform seeks to elevate the access to truthful, relevant news in local communities, particularly disenfranchised communities that struggle to have equitable access to reliable local information. By providing the truth via an easy to access medium, we hope to further secure the health and safety of our local communities, combat the spread of misinformation through unchecked media channels, and align communities on a shared vision to a better, safer future for everyone. These prize funds would enable our team to scale the technology for a variety of topics beyond COVID-19, and employ full time members to pursue this goal.

Our technology platform currently uses a multi-classifier set to qualify news content as:

1. COVID-related 
2. Relevant to a user based on their location and needs. 

After training across a dataset of approved and rejected news content curated by our team of journalists and editors, we produce a confidence interval to determine the likelihood of the news article being qualified to display on the website. Over time we hope to expand this technology tool to be used not only for COVID-19 topics, but any topics where local communities may benefit. That would include, but not limit to topics such as pandemics, political strife, health and security, food access, and local business information. The prize money from the AI for Humanity Prize would provide resources to continue investigation on furthering the development of this algorithm to scale for a variety of topics.