Anybody interested in smart ways to cover local news and building online communities around news coverage–in other words, anybody who wants to succeed in the news business going forward–should rush over to the new NewsMixer site developed by a group of Medill School of Journalism students in conjunction with the Cedar Rapids Gazette.
Auf Recovering Journalist wird News Mixer vorgestellt (Motto: „We’re playing with new ways to talk about news. Take a look around and join the conversation.“). Dabei handelt es sich um eine journalistische Verbindung von (lokalen) Nachrichten mit Facebook. Die Idee dazu stammt von Rich Gordon (professor of journalism at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University), der gemeinsam mit seinen Studenten und der örtlichen Zeitung (Cedar Rapids Gazette) das Projekt realisiert hat. Hintergrund und Prinzip von NewsMixer wird in der offiziellen Mitteilung der Uni so erläutert:
By making use of Facebook Connect, a newly released feature of Facebook, News Mixer allows its users to log in with their Facebook ID. Facebook Connect also allows News Mixer to become personalized automatically by highlighting comments from each user’s social network.
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The Medill team also hopes the Facebook connection will increase young adults’ engagement with local news. They decided to focus on the 20- to 34-year-old demographic because it is an audience that local media companies are desperate to connect with and the group most technologically savvy and most familiar with online social networking.
