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
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