All Posts Tagged With: "digital media test kitchen"

Unless your personal blog is your livelihood and brings in a decent amount of revenue, it’s sometimes difficult to keep it well fed. That’s my excuse for not having posted here in over a month. (Yikes!) … But I have been working on some fascinating news- and technology-related projects recently, so I share them here as an update.

Nearly all my work time has gone into the Digital Media Test Kitchen at CU-Boulder’s School of Journalism & Mass Communication, a program I founded and direct. (Yes, that journalism school — the one that may be “discontinued.” But no, it’s not the end of journalism education at the University of Colorado, but rather an institutional process that will modernize it as part of an overall restructuring to make journalism and media teaching and research more interdisciplinary and relevant to the digital transformation under way in our society.)

I’ve been pleased that the Test Kitchen program has been raising donor money despite the uncertainness of the university process’ eventual outcome, including two donors coming forward just last week.

So, here are some of the project areas that we’re working on at the Test Kitchen. I welcome partnership and collaboration inquiries in these areas, as well as new research ideas to benefit the news sector.

• Membership models for news. This is a Journalism-Business research project looking into alternative revenue models for news websites (and including mobile components) vs. “paywalls” that some news publishers have put in front of commodity news content. We’re focusing on two areas of news providers where paywalls don’t make much sense: investigative reporting organizations and collegiate media.
• Social gaming to change news behavior. In partnership with the developers of the popular Qrank mobile social news/trivia/history quiz, we’re experimenting with and examining the role of mobile gaming in changing the news-consumption habits of young adults, and increasing news awareness.
• Always-on video as a news tool. In the area of “life-casting” is technology that allows an individual to record everything that happens to them, including video recording of everything that the person sees and hears. We think a more practical use for always-on video is for reporters out working a story.
• Cross-device media viewing. We’re experimenting with ways to allow for better consumption by an individual of long-form journalism across multiple devices (PC, smartphone, tablet, etc.) by allowing an article reader to pick up where he/she left off when picking up a different media device at a later time.
• Mobile augmented reality. This is an area where we’re looking at the potential of smartphone AR technology being put to use for innovative editorial presentation and reporting, and for new forms of local advertising.
• Next-generation news aggregators. We’ve gotten a start on that with our beta SlicesofBoulder.com site, but more is in store, including a refined user interface and aggregator-level source ratings.

There’s more, and I’m excited about the coming year. As I mentioned above, I love to hear from potential partners and collaborators: students, academics, entrepreneurs, etc. E-mail me at steve.outing@colorado.edu or call me at 303-834-7810.

And if the Digital Media Test Kitchen sounds like a program worthy of your financial support, allow me to point you to our Giving page!

Over on the website of the Digital Media Test Kitchen (I’m director of that program at CU-Boulder), I’ve posted an update on one of our projects, called “Slices of Boulder,” which we’re working on with a technology partner, Toronto-based Eqentia, using its semantic publishing and distribution platform.

Work is happening over the summer, including building a taxonomy for the city of Boulder and surrounding communities, and identifying all of the local news and information digital sources currently in operation and serving Boulder’s residents. The latter is a fascinating, if big, task; the number of online sources of local, niche-local, hyper-local, and neighborhood news and information sources has grown significantly in the last year or two.

If you head on over to the Test Kitchen site at the link above, you’ll see a table I created of just some of the varied online sources available in the Boulder area today. The breadth and scope of the list (and what I published is just a small sample) is impressive. There’s a lot of diversity in the digital media-scape these days, even within a single mid-sized city. (Try this for a bigger city like Seattle, and you’ll be even more impressed by the growth of the “5th estate.”)

The reason for this, of course, is both the ease and low cost for anyone to publish in the digital age, and the decline in our local legacy news organizations, which just like in most other communities have seen editorial workforce reductions that leave holes in coverage of the Boulder area.

We expect to have a working website, a deep local-news-and-info aggregator, ready by the end of the summer or early fall.

While I’ve mentioned it a time or two on Twitter, I haven’t written much about the Digital Media Test Kitchen, which the University of Colorado School of Journalism & Mass Communication and I are building. Recently, I got the go-ahead to open up the website and blog for the Test Kitchen and start to spread the word.

Please do take a look around and tell me what you think of our mission and early research and development projects.

The simplest way to describe what the Test Kitchen is about is to emphasize how we are bringing together Journalism students and faculty with their colleagues from Computer Science and Business (and likely other disciplines as well in the future, depending on the project), as well as outside partners, to address the problems of journalism and the news sector and invent new solutions.

Our three primary areas of interest are news business models, new techniques for journalism, and new technologies for news.

The first Test Kitchen project is under way, and focuses on how to present in-depth (a.k.a., enterprise and investigative) news on the small screen of a smart-phone. This is a collaboration with I-News, the non-profit Rocky Mountain Investigative News Network. No, we don’t expect many people to read or view an entire investigative reporting package on an iPhone, but we do want to figure out how to make the limited time you spend on your phone reading and interacting with in-depth journalism a good experience.

I see our project team’s mission as helping news providers (old and new) make the right transition to the mobile platform, and not repeating the news industry’s big mistake when it moved from print to web (i.e., a “shovelware” approach to content rather than taking advantage of what the new medium of the web made possible).

I’d love to hear your ideas for future Test Kitchen projects that will move news forward. (Idea submission form.) And I’d like to hear from media and technology companies about possible collaboration. And, oh yeah, I’d be especially eager to talk with potential additional funders and donors to support the Test Kitchen in combining the ingredients of journalism, business, and technology to create more new recipes for reinventing news for the digital age.