Jeremy Gilbert : Design Thinker, Professor and Multimedia Journalist » Web Design

Journalism + Technology: Medill + McCormick

JeremyGilbert — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 17:18:38 +0000

Journalists around the world know that changes in technology have reshaped media. But only a few journalists have taken the time to explore the methods for communicating and collaborating with the technologists who made possible these changes.

For 12 weeks almost a dozen Medill graduate students and a similar number of computer science students explored these questions while they created potentially industry changing applications.

In a class I co-directed with Dr. Kris Hammond and Dr. Larry Birnbaum from Northwestern University’s InfoLab five cross-disciplinary teams built these five exciting projects, this was how the students described them in their final report:

Machine Generated Sports Stories (aka. StatsMonkey): an application that automatically writes sports stories based on box scores
News Feed: an iPhone application that presents users with stories of a particular length and topic depending on how much time they have to read
EasyWriter: a Microsoft Word plug-in that automatically brings up Internet search results alongside a document based on highlighted text
Tweedia: a widget that can be incorporated into a news Web site to enable readers to see real-time tweets related to an article
Twitter Publishing: programming that allows Twitter users to automatically receive relevant news links based on their tweets

Our First Loves: True Multimedia Confessions

JeremyGilbert — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 07:23:56 +0000

Twelve Medill undergraduates learning about interactive design were challenged to make a multimedia storytelling Website about something they felt passionately about. To my surprise and that of my co-instructor, Susan Mango Curtis, the subject they felt passionately about was… love.

The students used audio, video, photography and animation to tell stories of peoples’ first loves. Our First Loves is filled with stories like someone’s love of John Travolta, Spaghetti or ‘the boy next door.’ Users of the site are encouraged to rate each story (‘crinkle my nose,’ ‘want to cry’ or ‘want to create an e-dating profile’) and to tell their own stories.

News Mixer: Making Commenting More Civil

JeremyGilbert — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 02:23:15 +0000

In Fall Quarter of 2008, six Medill students in a class I co-directed with Rich Gordon built a prototype for new ways of commenting on news stories called News Mixer. Working with the Cedar Rapids Gazette, a newspaper in eastern Iowa, the team spent 11 weeks conceiving, designing and building open source tools to improve online dialogue.

The final product was built in the open-source web framework Django, uses Facebook Connect for registration and is available on Google Code for your use. The project went on to win an award from AEJMC’s 2008 Best of the Web and be a finalist for a 2008 ONA award. The two journalists-coders, Brian Boyer and Ryan Mark have gone on to found the Chicago Tribune’s News Application Team.