Four journalism innovation ideas - from talented young media innovaters

A break from the digest this week - for something a bit different - here's what the third-year students on the University of Central Lancashire's journalism innovation module have come up with

Good afternoon,

And a happy Wednesday and welcome to May. A different digest this week, instead of a handful of links that I’ve seen of interest, I thought I’d share with you a snippet of what the talented students from UCLan I’ve been teaching on journalism innovation have come up with. I’ve written about their work before - when they undertook a mini sprint process - with two of the students modelling their prototype below they produced in just 90 minutes.

Last week they did their pitches on their ideas and business plans for their innovations to Alison Gow, Francois Nel and myself. It was heartening to see how much focus and effort, and truly innovative ideas, they’d put into them.

Below is a quick summary of each of the group’s ideas and if you’re interested in learning more about any of them - or chatting to the students involved - then please drop me a line at ed@almaonline.co.uk

News4You - Liam, Josie and Qura

A smart news aggregation newsletter - building on what the likes of InYourArea, Edinburgh Minute and others do - but mixing localisation and topic personalisation together. The team had a clear prototype and had thought through a pricing model too for how they’d look to make it sustainable. There was some clever use of AI as well for how they’d efficiently index content and then serve it up for people to engage with.

NAVI - Qibin, Feixiao and Shuaiyu

This was a tool aimed at freelance journalists and smaller to medium-sized newsrooms, it helped to identify trending topics to write about and suggested news lines, angles and headlines. The team had also identified with the likes of Crowdtangle going there was a gap in the market for a new trending tool to act as a replacement, particularly for smaller to mid-size newsrooms, who may not have the time to sift through a lot of data. They’d also built in translation as part of the content suggestions too - so it would allow them to pitch the tool to operate in multiple markets (not just the English-speaking world).

PersonNews - Yahui, Ziyue, Jianqiu and Wenming

Taking a reader’s personality-type (using the Myles-Briggs indicator test!) and then personalising the news and information you see - it was illustrated with characters who personified each type of trait (there’s 16 or so in total). As well as the content mix there was also a gamification and social network element to the website/app as well. A very different, and innovative way, of introducing personalisation into news.

News Explorers - Thomas, Robyn and Joanne

The team identified a gap for a lack of social video content aimed directly at children about news - drawing on inspiration from Canada where a broadcasters YouTube channel was doing very well, in comparison to say BBC’s Newsround social video output. They focused in on using the YouTube for Kids app to create a channel dedicated to taking news topics and making interactive videos focused on different age groups. Smart.

It’s been great to see the teams pull together their proposals and apply what they’ve heard about over the past three months from industry guests about innovation and changes happening in the media sector to their projects. They all pitched really well - in what is an intimidating environment when you’ve got Alison giving you the dead-eye stare (I kid!) and they handled the Q&A sessions really well, especially when asked about their projections.

So a different digest this week, more what I’ve been hearing and seeing rather than reading.

Have a great rest of the week, thanks for reading and keep going.

Ed