In fall of 2008, Team Crunchberry- six journalism students at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism - partnered with Gazette Communications in Cedar Rapids, Iowa to explore the broad idea of building better conversations around news. After four weeks of researching and defining our project, six weeks of designing & developing software, and two weeks polishing & presenting our work, we went live with our final product, News Mixer.
And now for the moment you’ve all been waiting for - how we did it. Now available for download is our final report (80 pages - 2.7MB pdf file), which documents all 12 weeks of our research, design and development processes. We also provide our findings and recommendations for the journalism industry, as well as further development of News Mixer.
You might also be interested in this roundup of reactions to the News Mixer site, written by our professor, Rich Gordon.
This has been a very educational experience for us, and we hope this final report will help educate journalists, media organizations and journalism schools (in addition to bettering conversations around the news!). We would like to extend one last thank you to our partners at the Gazette, our industry experts, our research panel, and of course - you - our readers who helped us develop News Mixer. Thanks!
