Knight Lab

The Undergraduate Experience

by Tyler Fisher

Hello!

Finding the Lab

"Design the future of news."

I thought I was Greil Marcus.

Journalism, Technology and Medill

Journalism education is deeply flawed.

I could have passed through Medill with no digital skills.

Web classes at Northwestern

Interactive News
Web Producing
Intro to Computer Programming
Tools and Technology of the World Wide Web
Human-Computer Interaction

None of these classes are required.

How do I learn with no roadmap?

How do I teach without skill?

Coming to Knight Lab gave me a roadmap.

Developing SoundCite

Initially, collaboration was hard.

Then, two key things happened.

We hired Joe Germuska.
We moved to Fisk Hall.

Joe!

An open, collaborative space felt like home.

April 2013: Alpha release

June 2013: Beta release

SoundCite was my first product.

I'm still parsing what I learned.

What is a journalism product?

What do journalists need?

Universally accessible
No coding required
Free to use

SoundCite's Answers

SoundCloud
Generated embed codes
Easy-to-use clip creator

Multimedia is the next frontier of web storytelling, long and short.

Longform storytelling is beginning to standardize multimedia.

SoundCite works with any story.

SoundCite is a tool that works in any type of story, providing the "show, don't tell" aspects of recent long-form storytelling on the web to any form of web publishing. [The Washington Post](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2013/06/26/this-tweetstorm-was-planned-in-advance/) used it in a fairly standard recap story of Wendy Davis's 13-hour filibuster in June 2013. What could have been just another story about Wendy Davis in the aftermath of her national rise to fame became something more, something that provided her words in context of the whole story. The future of storytelling on the web is bringing the powerful tools we have standardized in longform storytelling and making them accessible to all of our stories. SoundCite, an inline tool that can be used in any system, is a step towards that goal.

Audio is not a first-class citizen on the web.

SoundCite still doesn't work on mobile.

Without a universally acceptable audio codec, browser suppport will remain weak.

We need more open source tools for journalists.

What's next?

Finding talent at Northwestern should be easier.

The Knight Lab must become Northwestern's community of webmakers.

Community-Building Initiatives

learn.knightlab.com
Open Lab Hours
Brown Bag Lunches

learn.knightlab.com

We have the technology.

Three Categories of Skill

Production
Data
DevOps

But first, digital literacy for all.

Open Lab Hours

A physical space for makers and learners.

Student-run, student-owned.

Brown Bag Lunches

Using our staff expertise

Knight Lab changed my life.

Every journalism school needs a Knight Lab.

Questions?