Idea Lab

Changes in Media Over the Past 550 Years

by David Sasaki
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Sergii Danylenko and Anna Prymakova asked me to speak about "changes in media over the past five years" at MediaCamp Kyiv last week. It's a pretty standard topic of discussion for me, but I felt that it would be more interesting and more useful to look at changes in media over the past 550 years. What follows is a hyperlinked version of my talk. I recently received an email from NowPublic, a popular citizen journalism website in North America, with the subject "Now Hiring." This is a rare thing in the field of journalism these days - citizen or traditional...

• November 14, 2009
• 6 comments

Why Journalists Should Develop Video Games

by Paul Grabowicz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

When I describe our Remembering 7th Street video game project to journalists, I often get a puzzled look. Why is a journalism school doing a video game? How does video game storytelling square with the craft of journalism or the mission of news organizations? Aren't video games about entertainment, not news? The pat answer to such questions is that kids are increasingly using game platforms to consume information, and news organizations need to embrace games if they're going to reach young people. For me personally, a video game also was a way to tell a more engaging story about the...

• February 6, 2008
• 5 comments

Text in Video Games: How Much is Too Much?

by Paul Grabowicz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

At a session on video games at the Online News Association conference last month, the panelists discussed how much text can be included in a game - a topic my students and I have been grappling with in our Remembering 7th Street video game project. A couple of the speakers on the Using Serious Games to Engage Readers panel cautioned against including long textual entries in games because they tend to turn off game players. "You can't provide reams of text, because they won't read it," said Duane Dunfield of Red Hot Learning, a video game company based in Canada...

• November 12, 2007
• 1 comment

History and Heritage Through Video Games

by Paul Grabowicz
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Can new technologies be used to tell old stories about a local community? That's the question we're trying to answer with our "Remembering 7th Street" project that uses a video game to tell the story of Oakland, California's old jazz and blues club scene. During the 1940s and 1950s, Oakland's 7th Street was a vibrant community and a mecca for jazz and blues musicians from all over the country. But in the late 1950s and 1960s the area fell victim to a series of ill-fated redevelopment schemes, and barely a trace of the jazz and blues clubs remains today. We're...

• October 13, 2007
• No comments