FactorDaily team wins Bengaluru Editors Lab hackathon

The FactorDaily team of Shrabonti Bagchi, Nikhil Raj and Animesh Saraswat walked away with the top honours at the Bengaluru Editors Lab, a unique journalism hackathon jointly organised by the Global Editors Network (GEN) and Deccan Herald here on Saturday and Sunday.

The Editors Lab had gathered 12 teams of media innovators for the two-day competition. Each team had a developer, a journalist and a designer. The event was part of GEN's series of hackathons that includes similar ones in Mumbai, Delhi and cities worldwide.

Working on the theme of 'Gender Inequality', the teams brainstormed and developed news prototypes such as apps, news website features, interactive visualisations, games, widgets and more.

The winning team won an invitation to the Editors Lab Final to be held later this year in Vienna during the annual GEN Summit.

To get on top of the innovators gathered, the FactorDaily team developed an online quiz entitled Uncleji Meter. Here's how the team described it: “The quiz aims to make people engage more deeply with the content they share, instead of reflexively forwarding it, in order to create awareness about gender stereotyping. All this is done through a fun, pop-culture infused quiz.”

This is how they linked the innovation to journalism: “We feel that the ‘media’ is not just what editors and journalists tell readers. But in the age of social media, it is also overwhelmingly about peer-to-peer sharing of views, opinions, attitudes and biases. That is why we chose to look at social media sharing of content rather than pure ‘journalistic’ content as part of this project.”