NewsMixer: Advancing the State of the Art

Anybody interested in smart ways to cover local news and building online communities around news coverage–in other words, anybody who wants to succeed in the news business going forward–should rush over to the new NewsMixer site developed by a group of Medill School of Journalism students in conjunction with the Cedar Rapids Gazette.

It's clearly an experiment and needs some polish and explanation, but NewsMixer is a very interesting new direction in community news (in every sense of that phrase). It crosses local news reporting with Facebook, encourages citizen participation and includes a very slick way of commenting and posing questions (for a reporter or the community to answer) about any particular facet of a story. Very neat. 

Rich Gordon, the Medill professor behind NewsMixer, also was the leader of Medill's breakthrough GoSkokie project, essentially the first-ever hyperlocal citizens journalism effort, almost five years ago (the class' project report, available in PDF form, is a seminal cookbook for building hyperlocal sites). Once again, Rich has gotten the students thinking way outside the box with NewsMixer, and it will be interesting to see how it develops and inspires other efforts.

Northwestern's own story/press release about NewsMixer quotes New York Times interactive news technologies editor Aron Pilhofer as admiring "bits and pieces of it I'd like to steal right now." Very well put. Medill, the Gazette and NewsMixer are breaking fresh ground. Everybody interested in news and community should be looking at it–and, um, stealing borrowing from it. (Honest to God, I interrupted writing this post to talk to the designer and developer of a little project I'm working on about ways that NewsMixer can inspire and influence what we're doing.)

Congrats to Rich Gordon and the NewsMixer (nee Crunchberry) team at Medill and the Gazette for a great piece of innovation. We need more like this.

Comments

[Rich Gordon]

Mark, thanks very much for the kind words.

A few other things:

(1) For more information on News Mixer and how it came about, check out:
* my posts about the project on the PBS Idealab blog: http://www.pbs.org/idealab/author/rich_gordon/
* the class Web site: http://www.crunchberry.org

(2) The code behind News Mixer is open-sourced and available on Google Code: http://code.google.com/p/newsmixer/. We are hoping that others will "stand on our shoulders" and continue to develop this project.

(3) I want to be sure the students get credit for this -- this was their project, not mine. So kudos to Brian Boyer, Angela Nitzke, Joshua Pollock, Stuart Tiffen and Kayla Webley. (Info about them is at http://crunchberry.org/the-team/.) Note to news organizations: All of them are either graduating or will be graduating by March.

Rich Gordon