CRITIQUE & LAUNCHING POINT

Throughout the two-day think tank, many important themes continued to rise to the surface: community journalism, user customization, paperless/mobile, engaging/fun content. Below, I want to describe some of the observations I made about the process and the people as well as briefly critique each prototype. Then make some kind of inspirational statement about ...

GROUP 3 PROTOTYPE

The concept

Our group identified two major problems: the disappearance of local journalism institutions and a public disconnected from journalists. So we wondered, "how might nomadic journalists work and how would community life continue to be successful?" This idea builds on Group 2 (inadvertently), mixes Spot.Us, Innocentive.com, OhMyNews.com, uWeb/iTunes/iNews and other journalism movements: public journalism, ...

GROUP 2 PROTOTYPE

The concept

This group wanted to develop a point system on a news website. For every activity users do, they receive points. People receive more or less points depending on their level of engagement. For example, commenting on a story nets maybe 2 points, but writing your own story is worth 10. The site basically ...

I was talking to Technology Editor Damon Darlin of The New York Times today and I briefly brought up the ideas I’ve been talking about this week in the rest of the blog. My main question was “what happens when browsers become obsolete?” He paused, raised an eyebrow and so I continued talking about uNews ...

This is my first post to this blog, so allow me to preface it with a brief introduction. My name is Jay Balagna, I'm a 19-year-old freshman studying journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno. I'm also the Assisstant News Editor for The Nevada Sagebrush. I'm originall from Denver, Colo. but I grew up in ...

So instead, news needs to find a way to create something that doesn't only help the journalist, but helps thousands of other unpaid creative people. uNews must be for more than news. It must be for all creative endeavours. It must be for InnoCentive.com, it must be for people who want to make money off of ...

Google operates, at this point in time, as if the Web is the be-all-end-all of communication. If the Web disappeared Google would die. Consider this more carefully. Google's entire operation is Web based. News, however, is cross-platform: TV, radio, Web, paper. If the Web died, news would survive. That's an important distinction. Google is not inventing ...