By: E&P Staff Some of the first winners of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation News Challenge have successfully developed and launched a new Web site that gives Facebook users a variety of ways to comment on the news.
Brian Boyer and Ryan Mark two Medill journalism students with a background in programming who were Medill scholarship winners (thanks to the News Challenge grant) along with four other Medill graduate students rolled out
News Mixer. The site was developed using Facebook Connect for the Cedar Rapids Gazette in Iowa.
It works like this: News Mixer feeds news and letters from around Eastern Iowa. Facebook users can log on with their Facebook ID and then comment on the news in three different ways. They can ask a question by clicking on the bubbles that run on the left side of the page next to each paragraph in the story and the reporter can answer back. They can comment about the article in general -- the comments run on the right side of the page along with the user?s Facebook profile picture. Or the person can write a short letter to the editor.
Gazette Communications, the parent company of the Cedar Rapids Gazette, has applied for a Knight grant to continue the work of the Medill students.
Other newspaper companies have taken note. Patrick Beeson, a content manager specialist for E.W. Scripps blogged that the project ?has birthed what could be game-changing efforts for news comments.?
The idea for News Mixer started with Rich Gordon, an associate journalism professor at Northwestern University. He was one of the first winners of the News Challenge grant. Gordon challenged his students to find a better way to comment on news articles than the typical comment box.
?Nobody has been particularly happy with the remarks appearing in comment boxes or thinks they further public discourse,? Gordon said in a statement. ?By creating a site with richer opportunities for interactive comments, we hope to improve the quality of online discussion that takes place around local news content.?
The students worked for 11 weeks on the ?Crunchberry Project? with Gordon and Medill assistant professor Jeremy Gilbert. The other students involved were Angela Nitzke, Joshua Pollock, Stuart Tiffen, and Kayla Webley.
Comments
No comments on this item Please log in to comment by clicking here