New Media Publishing Project Fall 2008

Introducing News Mixer: A 'Game-Changing' Approach to News Engagement

The fall 2008 New Media Publishing Project class set out this fall to solve two challenging problems: Improving conversations around news, and building news engagement among young adults.

Here's what they came up with: News Mixer. It melds three "commenting structures" -- question and answer, short-format "quips," and letters to the editor -- into a site that leverages users' social networks by using the newly released Facebook Connect system.

News Mixer was created by six Medill master's students: Andrea Nitzke, Joshua Pollock, Stuart Tiffen, Kayla Webley and "programmer-journalists" Brian Boyer and Ryan Mark. Boyer and Mark, who had careers in computer programming before coming to Medill, enrolled at the school through a "programmer-journalist" scholarship program funded by the Knight News Challenge.

News Mixer is already getting some positive feedback. Patrick Beeson, a content manager for E.W. Scripps Interactive Newspaper Group, wrote that News Mixer "could be a game-changing effort for news story comments." Blogger Nick Gehring wrote that News Mixer "takes news-story commenting out of the ghetto."

What’s online now is a demonstration site. To try it out, log in with your Facebook ID. You can also get an overview of how the site works via a six-minute screencast that the students prepared. For an in-depth look at how the site was developed - and recommendations for journalists, media companies and journalism schools - download the class's 79-page (PDF) final report. A video (see above) of the students’ final presentation in Evanston is also available.

Here are the key features of News Mixer:

Facebook Connect. Using a Facebook ID means you don't need to establish a new login and password to use News Mixer. Beyond that, Facebook Connect allows the site to display comments from your social network, meaning that every user has a different -- and personalized -- experience. We're thinking that this will stimulate more intelligent discussion than generally occurs via the open-ended comment box that appears at the end of articles on most news sites. Also, every time you post to News Mixer, you are given the option of cross-posting that comment to your Facebook feed, which exposes it to friends not using our site and potentially draws them to participate as well.

Three options to comment. Team Crunchberry decided to offer three very different options for reader response:

· Questions and Answers: Displayed like annotations in the margin of an article, readers can ask a question about any paragraph of the article -- or answer questions left behind by other people.

· Quips: Displayed as a small talk-bubble in a live feed on the home page and on article pages, quips are short-form comments that allow people to leave feedback in a quick, to-the-point form. They're modeled after Twitter and instant-messaging.

• Letters to the Editor: A very old idea, but with a few new twists. News Mixer calls on letter writers to "Add your voice to the marketplace of ideas. Offer a thoughtful point of view in 250 words or less." Once written, letters are treated equivalently to articles in News Mixer. Each letter gets its own page, and people are allowed to write letters in response. When a letter is particularly insightful, an editor can use the News Mixer content management system to designate it as an "editor highlight." The "editor highlight" letters are given prominence on the main Letters to the Editor page, and also appear on the home page, intermingled with news articles. The idea is to encourage and reward the most thoughtful responses.

User profiles. 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 people you're following on News Mixer are aggregated and quantified in your user profile, which serves as the nexus for the News Mixer social community.

A personalized home page. The News Mixer home page highlights recent comments and "quips" from your social network. It also highlights a question that has recently generated a lot of activity.

The student team developed News Mixer in response to a challenge from their instructors, Associate Prof. Rich Gordon and Assistant Prof. Jeremy Gilbert. They asked the class to find a better way of encouraging news-based conversations than the open-ended comment boxes typical on most news sites.

“Nobody’s been particularly happy with the remarks appearing in comment boxes or thinks they further public discourse,” says Gordon. “By creating a site with richer opportunities for interactive comment, we hope to improve the quality of online discussion that takes place around local news content. We also hope the Facebook connection increases young adults’ engagement with local news.”

The class was sponsored by Gazette Communications, which owns the daily newspaper and ABC television affiliate in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The company is interested in launching a version of the site, geared to young adults in eastern Iowa, in 2009. The code has been made available on an open-source basis on Google Code, so others can use it as well.

Medill still has several Knight News Challenge scholarships available to programmer-developers. The scholarships provide a fully funded master’s degree at Medill and an opportunity to participate in a future innovation class similar to the one that spawned News Mixer. (For more information on the scholarship program, visit http://www.medill.northwestern.edu/admissions/programmers.html.)