Designing social and mobile journalism

23 Mar 2016

Students from the team Media Minute won the award for best project that blended aspects of Journalism and Social & Mobile Computing. Pictured here receiving their prize from course coordinators Ms Skye Doherty and Dr Daniel Angus. Photo by Genevieve Worrell.

Designing Social and Mobile Journalism 

Augmented reality news readers, large interactive touch screens and newsgames is how The University of Queensland Journalism students imagine the future of news.

The Designing Social and Mobile Journalism exhibition that took place at The Edge on Wednesday 29th October featured the work of third-year students tasked with solving a journalistic issue. 

To do this, students from the School of Journalism and Communication and the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering worked on semester-long, group-based projects, which resulted in some innovative and exciting digital journalism applications.


The Media Minute team demonstrate their prize-winning interactive news concept to ABC's Matthew Liddy, the executive producer of special coverage for ABC News Online. Photo Genevieve Worrell.

The teams consisted of a mix of journalism and interactive design undergraduate and masters students.

This is the second year the initiative has been offered, the rationale being the same: in the social and mobile age, journalism needs to innovate to remain relevant.

This year the groups made use of augmented reality, social media, serious gaming, mobile technology, robotics and wearable computing.

The projects blended technology with contemporary journalism practice to enhance the production, dissemination and consumption of news.

In her address last night, journalism lecturer Skye Doherty, who co-ordinates the Convergent Production course, noted the value of multi-disciplinary collaboration and design thinking.

"We've got some creative ideas here about how journalism might evolve, and the projects show the potential for practice-led research methods to address real world problems."

Journalism and Information Technology Lecturer Dr Daniel Angus, the co-ordinator of the Social and Mobile Computing course also emphasised the benefit of collaboration.

"Let us be clear that this is not a one-sided venture, and it is not the geeks riding on their shiny white iHorses that will save the day, nor is it for the journalists to wholly recreate their business models and product offerings."

"Our experience these last years is that it is only when all members of the team, from Journalism, Design and IT get to contribute that you witness truly visionary projects, and facilitating that process has been incredibly rewarding for us as educators."

 

 
Students were encouraged to utilise different technology platforms to develop their ideas. Team Revolv developed an interactive news app that helps organise and reveal the development of news stories in time. Photo by Genevieve Worrell.


Photo by Genevieve Worrell.

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