The Hank Greenspun School of Journalism and Media Studies was a winner in this year's 21st Century Knight News Challenge, a worldwide contest designed to find new ways to gather and distribute news. The $230,000 award is the journalism program's largest competitive grant.
A team of UNLV students is collaborating with groups from six other colleges on the yearlong project. They will use an incubator process to develop ideas for using digital information to build local communities. Professor Charlotte-Anne Lucas assembled an international team of students: Robert Ponte and Jenna Kohler of Nevada; Kristin Dero of Idaho; Lauren Johnson of California; Johann Castro of Peru; and Heperi Mita of New Zealand.
We asked Ponte for his thoughts on local news in a digital world:
The newest version of media consumers, dubbed citizen-journalists, enjoy a great opportunity -- or suffer a heavy burden, depending on how you look at it. They must not only inform themselves but also help inform others within a community.
Coverage of the Minneapolis bridge collapse and the Virginia Tech shooting showed how onthe-fly cameramen can add content. But the transition from paid professionals to circumstantial citizen-journalists in news coverage doesn't reach down to the most local level.
Imagine a place where members of a community can easily go and tell their most interesting stories, share their brightest ideas and their most profound insights. Sound like a blog? Not quite. Blogs are usually dedicated to individual experiences or interpretations, augmented by reader comments. Think more of a ramped up online forum. A place that conveys collective experiences, using many interpretations to yield the most accurate one. When the opportunity hits, those involved in a story would speak, telling their own stories in their own words; the rest of us need only to digest and respond.
Forums are nothing new, but they have been limited in their ability to lead readers quickly through information. My generation of journalism students will have to find an effective system for summarizing each story quickly, at a glance actually. Pictures do this for the content found on YouTube and Flickr, but it's tougher with text and audio. I see two complementary methods for browsing these less visceral mediums. First, sort and filter your way to a manageable list using meta-tags, geo-tags, comments, and popularity
indexes. Then build up a social network, which casually presents content according to social connections.
Applying social networks to news has been attempted by MySpace and others but poor results led to their eventual demise. It might be better to build the network from the news side rather than adding news to the networking side.
So it's back to the basics. How can we build a system that brings you the news that matters, from the people and communities that matter to you? And how do we get you and your grandma to use it?
My fellow students and I in the 21st Century Knight News Challenge project are trying to apply the fundamentals of city planning to an online social network. Combine commerce, work, and social life as a city does and connect it all to an actual place through citizen-journalism. Integrate the opportunity for spontaneity and connections into the DNA of the website, just as a real-world city does.
Of course, we don't have the best model for bringing neighborhoods and their residents together -- Las Vegas still suffers from policies that failed to foster interaction in our residential areas -- but I think this deficiency can become a competitive advantage. We all realize that our actual neighborhoods are merely collections of houses and big-box stores. We know that our homes and apartments are arbitrarily connected. So we Las Vegans have a niche to fill for some kind of semi-anonymous, interactive community. And that's where we come in. Let's discuss (preferably online somewhere).
