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Pam McAllister-Johnson

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Pam McAllister-Johnson

Should We Teach with Open Source Software?

Western Kentucky University if one of seven academic programs working on a joint Knight Brothers 21st Century News Challenge grant (Ithaca College, Kansas State, Michigan State, Saint Michael's College, the Univeristy of Kansas, and the University of Nevada-Las Vegas). Three student-developed projects were presented at the Online News Association conference last year. This summer, the innovative digital news projects are being tested at newspapers. We were instructed to use open-source software for our projects. Open-source is free. In the open-source community, there are comparable programs for every retail package produced by the big companies. Open-source software can be well- documented...

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In the end, there's no real trick or black magic to making news valuable: it's about providing readers with what they want to read, as opposed to what publishers think they should be reading.

Joe Franscella
Non-Profit News Becomes the Flavor of the Month

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