MediaShift Idea Lab

Interactive Journalism

Angela Powers — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 17:03:42 -0500

The A.Q. Miller School of Journalism hosted an informational meeting with local elected public officials on Wednesday, November 19, to showcase VoxPop, an interactive tool for civic engagement, developed by journalism students through the Knight News Challenge grant. The school is collaborating with the Manhattan Mercury to launch and research VoxPop. The software innovation allows area citizens to contact elected officials regarding local issues in the news.
The AQ Miller School of Journalism at Kansas State University was among a consortium of universities awarded a $235,000 grant by the Knight Foundation to develop new ways and technologies that can help community newspapers to better engage citizens in local issues. Students developed a web-based software that helps citizens contact public officials using news sites. The software is embedded in news stories and once citizens read a story, they can automatically contact a public official regarding an issue mentioned in the story.
The informational meeting was held at the Union Pacific Train Depot, 120 Fort Riley Boulevard, on November 19 at 5 p.m. Elected public officials in the Manhattan, Kansas, community were invited to learn more about this civic engagement initiative. They were also asked to fill out a questionnaire on civic engagement which will be used for researches purposes.
About 50 people attended the event. Dr. Angela Powers' opening remarks were as follows:
Tonight we will hear a brief report from one of our students who helped develop Vox Pop, Matt Sundberg. We will also see a demonstration from the Manhattan Mercury conducted by Brian Rempe. What you will hear is the result of 2 ½ years of work, and I would like to tell you how this project came to be.
About three years ago, Dr. Dianne Lynch, Ithaca College had an idea that students should challenge one another to come up with a better model of community journalism. At the time, deans and directors from journalism programs around the country were participating in a leadership fellowship program. One evening 7 deans and directors met in Dr. Lynches' hotel room to brainstorm about writing and submitting a grant to the Knight Foundation. You must realize these activities are time-consuming and often burdensom because we're all really busy with administration, teaching, research and day-to-day running of our programs. However the potential to benefit our students and our communities was too hard to resist.
We submitted the proposal and received a reward $230,000. Our next step was to select faculty members to take on the project and recruit students and mentor them over the following year. I presented the idea to my faculty and asked for interested parties. Dr. Sam Mwangi stepped up to the plate. Again, you have to realize that as a new tenure-track faculty, Sam is extremely busy prepping classes, getting used to the community, working on his tenure and promotion, advising student organizations and doing research. There was no guarantee that this project would help in get tenure or result in anything positive... except that it would benefit students. But that's all Dr. Mwangi needed to know.
Sam's challenge was to find good students; each program was allowed seven. He solicited our best, and 7 stepped up to the plate. Incentives for the students included course credit, stipends, travel, networking possibilities and the change to make a difference. Once they were brought on board, they had to promise they would not quit. And it took a great deal of effort on their part to participate over the next year.
Seven groups of 7 students traveled over the summer, brainstormed, discussed ideas, agreed and disagreed with each other, and finally they developed 7 prototypes for digital media. Three of the projects were chosen for presentation at ONA in Toronto.
The last phase was to implement the projects and conduct research on impact, which brings us here tonight. Our students and Dr. Mwangi had the vision and General Manager Ned Seaton at the Manhattan Mercury had the intelligence and courage to try it out. What started as an idea in a hotel room was nurtured and then bloomed into something that would impact a lot of students and give them experiences they would have never had otherwise and result in a project that would change the way that media and the community would interact in Manhattan, Kansas. I can see this going statewide and even national in no time.
As of this writing, almost a month after the meeting with public officials, VoxPop is live. As Brian Rempe wrote, "Hey guys, I just wanted to let you all know that VoxPop is now live and working on The Mercury's site! Let me know if you see or hear of any problems. I am excited to hear the response!" So are we. Stay tuned.

Trying to Solve the Civic Media Participation Gap

Angela Powers — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 09:51:42 -0500

Knight News Challenge winners are meeting at MIT to discuss the future of civic media. The focus has been on PARTICIPATORY culture and the skills that the youth and others need.

Problems that have been identified include the following:

Transparency problem: people are swimming in media

Participation gap: resources growing in the life of young vs. those who are alienated from the resources. While more information and laptops are available in public spaces, usage and time are limited. Also, users can't store information, etc.

Ethics challenge: norms and standards of the journalism profession are still stressed, High school students are writing and participating online with increased public access, creating exciting new modes of expression. However, these new modes are rarely understood by adults, so there's less mentorship.

How can we encourage and influence these young folks?

Social skills and cultural competencies are needed. One way to develop such skills is through civic engagement which is occurring in Computer Clubhouses. These online groups function with the following goals:

Support learning through design experiences
Help youth build on their own interests
Cultivate an emergent community of learners
Create an environment of trust and respect
Empower youth and enrich community.

Through these clubs, youths are engaging with each other and learning from each other. Adults are also mentoring the work of youths closely. There are 124 clubhouses in 21 countries. Examples include the LA Youth Development Organization and the Miami...Little Haiti Housing Organization. Researchers are looking to engage with the communities where clubhouses are located around the world to study how they act as a community centers, bridge gaps between multi-lingual communities and immigrant communities.

The goal of most the projects being discussed at MIT this week is to look at what is needed to support and engage online local communities. Civic engagement connects us, so it is important to get people to think about collective identity. Most of this can be done through free and open-source software.

Journalism Education and Social Networks

Angela Powers — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 13:42:39 -0500

Citizen journalism, the blogosphere, YouTube, Facebook and more...what do these social networks and new media forms have to do with journalism and mass communications? Often they refer to individuals, rather than traditional media organizations, playing an active role in collecting, reporting and disseminating news.

* For example, students at Northern Illinois University took to the streets writing, shooting photos and blogging during the hours and days that followed the Valentines Day shooting. Kyle Yataes posted a video on UTube, providing more moving coverage of the events than the local news.

Journalism as we know it today is becoming less confined by traditions. Bloggers value informal conversation and expressive writing over objectivity and fairness. However, both have a place in today's media landscape; these new forms of journalism aren't competing with traditional journalism as much as providing supplemental information, as we saw in the coverage of the shootings at Northern Illinois University.

We continue to work with our students on balance and context in communications. Teaching basic and advanced skills is more important than ever as the success of media organizations, in large part, rests on credibility. However, faculty members are adding to the mix in a number of important ways.

1. Professor Sam Mwangi and Incubation Innovators:

Students are working with the local newspaper to increase interest in local politics by creating online links with area officials, using the model created in the Knight News Challenge.

2. Professor Kimetris Baltrip and Internet Journalism:

Bill Dedman, Pulitzer Prize Winner, Investigative Reporter for MSNBC.com and founder of Power Reporting taught special segments on Web Research, Computer Assisted Reporting, Using spreadsheets, and How to write complex stories. Both students and faculty benefited from the experience in Dr. Baltrip's class.

3. Professor Gloria Freeland, Director of Huck Boyd National Center for Community Media:

Greensburg, Kansas is the most recent point of interest. Funds have been established to recreate journalism in the digital era after the town and its media was destroyed by a tornado last spring. Mark Anderson, the editor of the Kiowa County Signal, visited in April to discuss natural and man-made disasters in the digital age.

4. Professor David MacFarland Technology Fund:

A new donor opportunity has been established in honor of Dr. MacFarland to provide students with more digital cameras, light kits, tripods, etc. We will also upgrade the technology in our convergence lab to conform to industry standards.

5. A New Combined Sequence, Journalism and Digital Media:

Students who have interest in either print or electronic media are no longer separated. Courses in convergence will provide students with skills across platforms. However students may still specialize in the medium of their choice ie. print, electronic, magazine, radio, photo, etc.

Growing pains are not uncommon as we move forward, but we know it's in the best interest of our students and organizations as well because we turn out better-prepared future employees.