Experimentation will help save journalism. Unfortunately, major news organizations’ business models are failing and research is one of the first things to go.
But journalism schools and students have the time and resources to experiment with solutions to the major disruptive changes rattling the industry. New approaches to information gathering and analysis are needed for journalism to flourish. We must build new tools for the creation and consumption of news.
This semester, Medill‘s Spring New Media Publishing Project offers journalism students an opportunity to design and build those new tools, working side-by-side with computer science faculty and students. Five teams are researching, designing, building and testing new information-driven applications. In the process, the journalism and computer science students are forging a common language and are starting to understand one another’s cultures.
To start the class, the students were presented with a set of problems. Based on interest, teams formed and began analyzing and interpreting the issues. Each week the teams must present their progress and get feedback from the faculty and other students. Using an agile design framework the teams set small, weekly goals to conceive and build specific features — for example scraping data from baseball box scores or designing the experience of selecting news by the time available.
Here are the projects the student teams are working on this quarter:
- Smart Editor: For writers, the Web not only provides a new platform for publishing, it’s also a wellspring of information. But moving from a Word processor to a Web browser to do a search interrupts the writing flow. Moreover, for journalists and others who need to turn around material on a deadline, a Google search can quickly become a time-wasting trap. Developing a refined search program as a Microsoft Word plug-in will bring efficiency to the process. Writers will be able to create documents as they normally would on Word and, when they’re in need of further information, hit a keyboard shortcut that brings up results of a search of key elements in the last sentence typed — right in Word. Not all Web sites are created equal, so the Smart Editor will allow users to select the sites they trust for their searches.
- Tweedia: This project will combine news stories with relevant personal opinion and information on the topic via Twitter. Many times individual people know information before the news media, or have personal information or opinions on the subject that may be of interest to readers. Our presentation idea for the story is to integrate ‘Tweedia’ into news Web sites so readers will have instant access to relevant Twitter posts (Tweets). News outlets would post a ‘Tweedia’ link on the bottom of stories that will either open a gadget on the page or redirect the reader to a ‘Tweedia’ page.
- News Funnel: Most people have limited time to read the news each day. The Internet offers unlimited hours of news content. Our project helps sift through this abundance of information and say, “I want this much news.” Our project will enable newsreaders to reduce the amount of time they spend searching for the news and will increase the time they spend reading actual news. The final product will be delivered via e-mail at set points every day (for someone like a commuter) or could be generated on the spot.
- Machine Generated Sports Stories: Stories written about baseball games are driven from statistics and have many repetitive elements. Sports writers are constantly balancing the need to describe what they witnessed and the desire to analyze, opine or tell deeper, human-centric feature stories. This project hopes to free sports writers to concentrate on the more complex stories and let a computer tell the stories based on statistics in volumes a human writer could never hope to meet. This project will automatically generate the stories of individual college baseball players’ stories from box scores and play-by-play data.
- Twitter-based news: One of Twitter’s greatest advantages is its simplicity. Our goal is to create a seamless integration system that sends pertinent news links to users based on their posts. In doing so, we want to keep Twitter running efficiently and keep users’ screens free of clutter, so we are designing this as a provision that either runs in the background of Twitter, or runs from a designated Twitter account that people can follow (or un-follow) at their desire.
Sound promising? Want to monitor the progress of the Medill teams as they work on these inventions? You can follow all of the projects and even help the students define and develop their work on the class blog: WriteClick.
What projects have your journalism students been up to?
