Idea Lab

A Coder Practices Multimedia Journalism -- with Open Source Tools

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Ryan Mark and Brian Boyer, the first two programmer-journalists whose Medill education is being financed by Knight News Challenge scholarships, have begun their second academic quarter (of four). They are reporting in Medill's Chicago newsroom and taking our introductory new media class, Interactive Techniques. For the new media class, they (like all the other students) are required to identify a topic that they will monitor and blog about it at least five times per week. All the students are required to set up and manage the technology underpinning the blog as well -- using Wordpress. Ryan's blog is called Digital...

• April 23, 2008
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Computation + Journalism = ?

by Rich Gordon
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

When the Knight News Challenge awarded me (and the Medill School of Journalism) a grant to offer journalism scholarships to computer programmers, I thought teaching journalism to technologists was a pretty novel idea. But it turns out some faculty at Georgia Tech's School of Interactive Computing were thinking along similar lines. Last spring, Prof. Irfan Essa and Ph.D. candidate Nick Diakopoulos taught an experimental course, "Computational Journalism," for computer science students at Georgia Tech. The course is being offered again during the current (spring) semester. Through readings and guest lectures, students in the two classes have learned how journalism is...

• February 17, 2008
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