NewsFireHose

Artist: Jayme Cochrane, Shervin Afshar

Description: NewsFireHose is a continual video stream of the newest stories to hit the front page of Google News. Google News aggregates news stories based on the number of articles written, thus promoting more prominent stories to the front page. NewsFireHose scours this page to find all stories with a corresponding or supporting video report on YouTube, and assembles a streaming playlists, constantly searching for the next breaking video.

To maintain a continual feed, NewsFireHose keeps a list of a number of most recent videos. If no new videos are found once the last one is played, NewsFireHose loops back up the list and begins playing the videos again from the start. Once a new video is found, NewsFireHose will jump down the queue to play it, and remove the oldest news video from the list.

Motivation: NewsFireHose automates the broadcasting process traditionally reserved for 24/7 news feeds such as CNN, CNBC, or Fox News. The selection process is handled by Google, which acts as a neutral curator for selecting top stories, judging only be sheer volume and speed of articles appearing (a story that quickly appears with hundreds of reputable news sources often jumps to the front page, and the amount of users clicking on the story helps propel it farther). We are attempting to remove impartial judgement from news filtering, and leaving our code to do the work of blindly selecting whatever is currently an important article (regardless of the content or context).

Stream Url: http://theartcollider.org:8002/NewsFireHose.ogg