` Jeremy Gilbert | Media Product Designer, Medill Journalism Professor: Design, Multimedia - Part 5

MoJo: Newscaster, User-Driven, Video Newscast

June 12th, 2011

We need your vote. Help Katie Zhu and me win the People-Powered News A challenge from MoJo (Mozilla + Journalism). The innovation challenge will identify 15 projects worth developing and we think Newscaster should be one. Here is an excerpt from our entry:

In place of a newsroom programmed, linear newscast Newscaster is an on-demand, user-driven video newscasts across a range of mobile and tablet devices (like the iPad) using an accessible, cross-device programming standard. The digital newscast would take full advantage of web-native technologies like HTML5 and JavaScript, but will be developed within the intent of being a mobile app, aiming to make news easier to consume while on the go…

…The application will allow users to add content to their own playlist and make news judgment decisions traditionally reserved for professional producers in a control room. Users can have any kind of news (weather, sports, crime, education, etc.), can play their own newscast at any time (rather than waiting for 10 p.m.) or choose from a variety of automatically generated newscasts that fit the time they have at hand (10, 15, 30 minute newscasts)…

Newscaster Wireframe

Please read the rest of the entry and vote for Newscaster.

AEJMC 2011 Best of the Web: Living Stories

June 8th, 2011

Created during a 2011 Winter Quarter class I co-taught with McCormick School of Engineering Professor Larry Birnbaum, Living Stories won third place in AEJMC’s 2011 Best of the Web design contest for Team Innovation.

About: Living Stories
Conveys the emotional impact of an unfolding news story through the voices of people involved and the powerful images that show the issues.

Project description
Given the name of a news event, like Libyan crisis, the earthquake and tsunami in Japan or the Wisconsin protests, this system finds news articles and extracts powerful quotes from the articles. It also finds relevant photos and displays them together in a news stream. Because the focus is on the experience of the story, anyone, news junkie or not, can dip into the stream without confusion.

Potential Audience
Living Stories can be used by news organizations — using just their exclusive content. This system can also be viewed by individual web users or displayed as an installation in a lobby or other public space.

Future work
Currently the stories are manually selected but the selection of stories could be automated. The stories could also be augmented through the use of a timeline — navigable by the user.

Student Team:

  • Sarah Alsulaiman, Computer Science
  • Phil Bencomo, Journalism
  • Chandra Sekhar Bhagavatula, Computer Science
  • Nick Pizzolato, Computer Science

Faculty Advisers:

  • Larry Birnbaum, Computer Science
  • Jeremy Gilbert, Journalism
  • Kristian Hammond, Computer Science