Tag Archives: Northwestern University

Adam Westbrook: Northwestern University’s journalism students and the ‘Innocence Project’

Adam Westbrook looks at an ongoing project at Northwestern University in the US, where students under the leadership of investigative journalist David Protess investigate, fact check and data mine criminal convictions in their region.

Focusing on murder cases where the defendants have been sentence to execution, the group has to date freed 11 men through their work.

“This isn’t so much an idea which has any business revenue potential obviously, although there’s a chance it could get a decent grant here and there. But what a way to get students engaged during their studies! And what a way to teach them the most difficult skill of all: investigation,” writes Westbrook.

Full post at this link…

ProPublica launches ChangeTracker with help of journalist-programmer

Not-for-profit news organisation ProPublica is already making the most of new journalist-programmer intern Brian Boyer, who joined the site last month.

Boyer, who graduated from a specialist programming-journalism course at Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, has created ChangeTracker – a tool to monitor changes made to WhiteHouse.gov, Recovery.gov and the upcoming FinancialStability.gov websites.

“ChangeTracker lets users see exactly what was removed, edited or updated on those sites by showing side-by-side comparisons of sites before and after changes made to them,” says a release from ProPublica.

What’s more you can get updates of the changes via RSS, Twitter, email or via the ChangeTracker webpage.

“ChangeTracker will help us keep an eye on the administration’s transparency pledges, and will help reporters, bloggers, government watchdogs and everyday citizens keep watch over the websites of their elected officials,” said Scott Klein, director of online development.

In true Boyer style, the programming behind the tool will be open source, much like his News Mixer application, for use by third-parties.

The organisation recently launched Shovelwatch – a site analysing President Obama’s stimulus package.

News Mixer API spawns Iowa Content experiment

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News Mixer, the final year project of programming-journalism students at Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University aimed at breathing new life into commenting systems on news sites, was always intended to be developed and adapted further by third parties.

“We got a lot of the hard work out of the way and the code is out there for anyone to play with (…) it’s free. Use it,” Brian Boyer, one of the developers behind it, insisted in an interview last year.

The open source nature of the project has allowed three developers from e-Me Ventures to create Iowa Content – a WordPress-based widget that aggregates localised news content from a range of sources and is connected to Facebook Connect.

Iowa Content is based on News Mixer’s quip function – short-form responses to news items, ideally suited to Twitter or Facebook status updates.

Being linked with the social network will encourage readers to discuss and comment on the news – as well as share links via their profiles.

It’s in the experimental stage right now, but as the intro video below says, it’s about ‘grassroots creation of meaningful content’: