By: E&P Staff Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism is developing technology applications that it hopes will help shore up the news industry. As traditional mass media business models decline, the project aims to apply technology in ways that generate new revenues or reduce journalism's production and distribution costs while maintaining its standards.
"We've got the resources, time and energy to do research and development that the news industry doesn't," Assistant Professor of Multimedia Jeremy Gilbert said in an announcement, citing Web applications in the works by journalism and computer science students.
One program generates sports stories from box scores and play-by-play. A plug-in enables reporters to quickly research or fact-check stories as they write in Microsoft Word without switching to an Internet search engine. A Web application for the iPhone offers five- to 20-minute segments of news for those with limited time. Twitter News Service sends pertinent news links to users based on their posts, all while keeping user screens clutter-free by running in the background of Twitter or from a designated Twitter account that users choose to follow. Tweedia will combine news stories with relevant personal opinion and information on a topic via Twitter (news outlets can place a Tweedia link at the end of stories that will open a gadget on the page or direct readers to a Tweedia Web page).
Online visitors can follow the class via the student blog
here.
Earlier this year, another student team created the NewsMixer interactive tool that provides new ways to discuss news online (E&P Online, Feb. 1, 12).
Gilbert is the lead instructor for journalism side of the New Media Publishing Project class, which is also taught by Rich Gordon, Medill's director of digital technology in education, and Kristian Hammond and Larry Birnbaum, professor and associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science in Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering.
"Interactive services that deliver news to consumers increasingly are technology-driven, and will be developed by journalists and technologists in collaboration with one another," said Gordon, adding that "technology can be used to help journalists do their jobs better."
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