Crunchberry Project

After much anticipation, Team Crunchberry is proud to present to you our final product: News Mixer.

Our mission statement: “For busy young adults, News Mixer is the only place to find the news affecting Cedar Rapids that your family, friends, neighbors and coworkers are talking about.”

And why is that, you ask? Because it harnesses the credibility of an established media company, leverages existing online social networks and gives people a constructive way to interact with each other and the news.

The site we have created is a demonstration site.  You can log in now with your Facebook username and password and try it out.  The folks at Gazette Communications want to launch a site based on News Mixer in  2009, and there are already some other people interested in using our open-source software.

Here’s a quick summary of News Mixer:

3 commenting structures to encourage and engage readers to discuss the news.

Questions and Answers: Displayed like annotations in the margin of an article, readers can ask questions or answer others left behind by other contributors to the discussion.

Quips: Displayed as a small talk-bubble in a live feed on the article page, quips are short-form comments styled after Twitter that allow people to leave feedback in a quick, to-the-point form.

Letters to the Editor: For users who really have something to say, they can write a letter to the editor in 250 words or less. Instead of having this commenting form at the bottom of an article, our letters to the editor live on their own page. Letters are highlighted by the editorial staff, and are also featured on our home page, highlighting user feedback for the community.

Facebook Connect

Along with the commenting structures, we have used Facebook Connect to take down the registration barrier from using our Web site. Facebook Connect also allows us to display your friends’ comments on every article.  This allows for transparent discussion, and as a direct result, we hope this will encourage more intelligent discussion.

User profiles

Finally, all users of News Mixer get their own profile page. On News Mixer, users are allowed to follow each other’s activity on the site, and view the activity in their news feed. Along with your own contributions, recent comments from your Facebook friends and News Mixer follow-ees are aggregated and quantified in your user profile, which serves as the nexus for the News Mixer social community.

The home page

The home page of News Mixer weaves news articles together with letters and responses from your social network.  On the top of the page you will see recent comments by people in your social network, and a hot question of the day.  Down the left side you will see news articles and letters posted in reverse chronological order.  And on the right you will see a live feed of the most recent quips.  The idea is to provide a quick snapshot of what’s new and what’s generating conversation, while highlighting the conversations involving your social network.

More to come

We’re sure you have a ton of questions about our processes, suggestions for improvement, and of course, comments about what we did. Many of these questions will be answered soonwhen we release our final report, and a video of our presentation. These materials will be found here at crunchberry.org, and will also be available on our News Mixer Web site.

Stay tuned…

BRUSSELS – I’m on a bit of a hiatus from the project this week as I am taking part in a delegation of journalism graduate students to the European Union. Each day we have been meeting with diplomats, representatives from the EU, NATO, the U.S. Departments of State and Defense, career journalists and other students trying to make it in this field.

When surrounded by such intelligent people who care a great deal about journalism as public service and a tool for democracy, one topic, be it over Belgian waffles, mussels, chocolate or beer inevitably comes to the surface, “Where is journalism headed?”

What now? Choconancy1/Flickr

I find the silver lining in these admittedly gloomy conversations knowing that this project could help answer this question.

One thing that consistently comes to mind is the importance of experimentation. Like the pack mentality of the EU press corps, the journalism industry has been waiting for someone to write the lede so the rest can follow suit.

Instead of waiting for someone else to find the answers, I appreciate the unique opportunity the Cedar Rapids Gazette has given us to experiment, succeed, and even, fail.

Our charge is simple: foster community interaction. Comments and discussion boards are the reigning formats for user-interaction. Yet, hardly anyone would argue they are the ideal systems. For the most part, users use them as soapboxes and rarely engage in dialogue with fellow readers. When dialogue does occur it is rarely the intelligent conversation newspapers aim to foster.

In a hypothetical world, a reader visits her local newspaper’s website one morning and an article about a robbery in her neighborhood catches her eye. No one was hurt and only $75 was taken from the till, but still she is worried. She has been reading about crimes in her neighborhood more often lately – it used to be such a safe place. But this woman is not a bystander; she wants to know how she can help. She logs into the website and notices 16 other registered users are reading the same story. She poses a question, “Does anyone want to chat about what we can do to stop the rising crime rate here?” Three users respond and they begin to chat about the problem, live, much like people do on AIM, MSN and Google Chat.

I’m certainly not saying this model is a winning solution. It probably assumes far too much about the level of civic engagement in American communities, and news organizations would likely worry about their inability to monitor such conversations. But it is an idea nonetheless – an experiment. It could fail. It could succeed. Much like the experiments we will test out as part of this project may fail or succeed. The important thing is we refuse to do what is already being done and we are lucky enough to have the opportunity to try something new.

Running along Cedar Lake in Cedar Rapids, IA / Image by CR Artist

As described in the previous post, we are a group of journalism students looking for ways to engage the Cedar Rapids community through local news.

One of our first steps in this process is to pinpoint a target audience. After we decide who we are trying to serve, we will need to figure out what their interests are and use that information to develop a product that better serves their needs.

Back to step one – Who are we trying to reach?

The Cedar Rapids Gazette has conducted market research into the online habits, media attitudes and news interests of their audience, which will help us to narrow our focus to a particular segment of the population.

Using the information they provided and reports by the Pew Internet and American Life Project we have decided to concentrate our efforts on reaching young adults (age 20-34) who may be starting families, careers and/or putting down roots in the Cedar Rapids area. According to the data, this group is already technology savvy and uses the internet for both news and entertainment. We have also found BetterTogether.org to be a helpful resource.

To get to know them better, we will be sending out surveys and talking with people in this group to get a better idea of their online habits, news sources, local interests, community involvement and ideas for improving the Gazette’s Web site to meet their particular needs.

We are in the early stages of information gathering, and what we will eventually develop is still being shaped by the feedback we hope to get from the Cedar Rapids community.