## 2 Materials and Methods
### Collection of User Requirements  
In software development, an important step before the implementation of a platform is the collection and analysis of user requirements. Thus, before the implementation of the EarthPress platform and the definition of its architecture, an online international workshop was conducted in March of 2021, aiming to determine the needs of journalists, current practices followed, and attitudes towards the EarthPress platform. The target audience, 134 participants, of the workshop was both journalists and academics. Many of the participants had experience in using EO data and in using other platforms for article generation. In the workshop, the use and importance of EO data were presented, along with the concept of the EarthPress platform. For this workshop, a questionnaire including both closed and open-ended questions aiming to identify the opinion, needs, and current practices followed by the participants when writing an article was designed. The questionnaire was available online for one week, and the link was sent to all participants at the end of the workshop. The results of the collected data analysis are presented in this sub-section. The designed questionnaire included two parts. In the first part, demographic information of the users, such as their gender, age, background, etc., was requested (Table 1). Additionally, one of the questions in the first part asked the users to answer if they previously used or are currently using information from EO data in their articles and if they have previously used other platforms for article generation. This was general information requested in order to have a better view of the sample used. The second part of the questionnaire concerned the retrieval of information about the type of data and current practices used during the generation of an article and the flow that is followed for the retrieval and analysis of EO data. In this part, the participants highlighted the main problems or issues currently existing in the field of journalism related with the scope of the platform. The issues presented by the majority of the participants concerned the fact that they did not have the means to collect adequate information for a certain topic and that the collection of all information for the gener \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c} \hline \hline
**Question** & **Answer-Distribution** \\ \hline Gender & Male (19.4\%), Female (79.1\%), Prefer not to say (1.5\%) \\ Age & 19–21(82.6\%), 22–51(17.4\%) \\ Education & Students (95.5\%), Other (4.5\%) \\ Experience in using EO data & Yes (26.1\%), No (73.9\%) \\ Experience in using article & Yes (7.5\%), No (92.5\%) \\ generation platforms & \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 1: Demographic information of the Participants. time-consuming task. As a second issue, they mentioned the restricted time frame they had for writing an article. Additionally, most participants responded that it was difficult to collect EO images related to a specific area of interest where the event had occurred and analyze them in order to extract any data included. Regarding the usefulness of the EO data, they mentioned that they would be interested in using such information when creating an article; however, this information should be processed. Moreover, another answer provided by some of the participants highlighted the existence of fake news among the news stories published by other journalists for an event as a problem. Additionally, the participants mentioned that it was crucial for the journalists to receive this information in a timely fashion and have access to all available multimedia and data (e.g., videos, analytics, local news posted, etc.) on a specific topic in order to use them for the article composition. In this context, the EarthPress platform will provide images and local news retrieved for a certain event/disaster to the end-users, allowing them to select the information that is taken into consideration for the text generation.