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gonzocamp brings programmers, journalists together for a
day
of news innovation
JUNE 4, 2009: Serra Media is proud
to announce the results of the first
GonzoCamp, a
day for news innovation and technology, sponsored by Serra Media and
hosted by the University of Washington’s Masters of Communication in
Digital Media. The event, which practically "sold out" (even though it
was free) in just a few days with limited promotion, brought together
almost 30 journalists, computer programmers, software developers,
entrepreneurs and students on Friday, May 22, 2009.
Some brought rich experience, like Rick Sass, a founding member of USA
Today, and Mike Koss, CEO of Faves.com and founder of Startpad.org.
Everyone brought ideas and enthusiasm. The goal was to gather a diverse
cross-section of professionals and
students together for a day of action instead of words. So there were
no presentations, no panel discussions. Just ideas for projects and
attempts at progress.
“I think it worked great and I would come again,” said Brianne Pruitt,
web editor for the Wenatchee World newspaper. “If you work for a news
organization, sometime it takes a long time to get anything done. So it
was cool to come together today and make so much progress in such a
short time.”
The event, co-sponsored by the UW’s Masters of
Communication in Digital
Media program and my company, Serra Media, began with about 15
ideas
pitched as projects that could be built in a day. None, of course, was
going to lift the news industry out of its current financial crisis,
but maybe we could discover the seed of an idea that would grow into
something much larger. Time will tell.
“Our Master of Communication in Digital Media program is intensely
focused on storytelling, social media and new business models of
communication,” said Hanson Hosein, a professor at the UW’s MCDM.
“That’s why it makes complete sense to host and support GonzoCamp.
These journalists, programmers and business development professionals
are not only part of our community, they’re at the heart of our
mission.”
Everyone had the opportunity to pitch an idea for a project in the
morning. Then teams were formed around
the three ideas that received the most votes. Each team had about four
hours to build a working prototype that would illustrate the concept.
All three teams were able to show something tangible when these ad hoc
presentations began around 3:30 p.m. They included:
- Seattle News Map:
"An
Alltop for local news,” this site that aggregates RSS feeds from local
news sites and
blogs and organizes them by neighborhood.
- Whose-news.com: Billed
as a “nutrition label for your
journalism,” the
Whose-News technology allows the reader to peel back the layers of a
specific news source and reveal the ownership structure behind the
publisher.
- PagesLike.com:
Technology that says “if you
like this story you are reading, then you might like these other
stories.” Those “other” stories could come from any Web site, making
PagesLike.com a valuable form of automated link journalism.
You can read a full report by Mark Briggs at his Journalism 2.0 blog here.
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| NEWSGARDEN: IT'S SOCIAL MAPPING FOR NEWS |
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