Journalism schools are useful for many things, including research into ethical standards, traditional skill development, and so on — but increasingly, some journalism schools are focusing just on building their students’ digital chops and entrepreneurial spirit alongside interview etiquette and the correct use of the off-the-record comments. One of the most recent projects in that vein is called Local East Village, a joint venture between the New York University’s journalism school and the New York Times that launched on Monday.
The website describes the venture as an attempt to “help foster a journalistic collaboration with a third partner, our neighbors in the East Village,” and to “give voice to its people in a wide-reaching online public forum and create a space for our neighbors to tell stories about themselves.” As NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen — who helped create the project — notes in his blog post about the launch, the area of the city that the site aims to cover is already well-covered by local blogs, but the LEV site states that it hopes to bring the “academic and intellectual resources of NYU [and] the vast journalistic experience and high professional standards of The Times.” It also adds that:
We hope, too, to provide innovation: For years now the lines between those who produce news and those who consume it have become increasingly blurred. And so we hope to bring our readers even more into the process of producing news in ways that few other sites have tried before.
One of the most interesting features of the project is what it calls the “Virtual Assignment Desk,” which is an application — essentially a plugin for the WordPress blog-hosting platform, which the site uses to publish its content — developed by a team led by Daniel Bachhuber, who is the digital media manager for the City University of New York graduate journalism school. The plugin makes it easy for anyone who wants to contribute to the site to see what stories or events need to be covered, so that they can volunteer. Readers can vote on the topics or news stories they want to see covered as well. Leer más “Helping Journalists Become Hackers and Entrepreneurs”