CHAPEL HILL – Students at UNC Chapel Hill are developing new ways for journalists to tell stories in an industry where newsrooms are shrinking and information is abundant.

Kate Sheppard

Last week, students in the School of Media and Journalism’s course, News Lab: Creating the Technologies of Tomorrow, pitched new digital products designed to help journalists and others leverage emerging technologies. The course is a program of the Reese News Lab, which focuses on the future of journalism through computational journalism, product development, audience engagement and emerging technologies.

The course, led by Kate Sheppard, senior enterprise editor at HuffPost and teaching associate professor at UNC, encourages students to work collaboratively to develop a marketable media product.

“The idea is to get students to think about how to develop the news products of tomorrow,” said Sheppard.

The course asks students to think about the process of getting a product to market by identifying a product that can address a specific problem. The students are then tasked with creating a business model for it.

“For me, a lot of times in journalism schools the focus is on how you get a job in a newsroom,” said Sheppard. “Today, you can’t expect it will be a traditional newsroom. It is on us to think about what is the next thing.”

Sheppard says that journalists today are not only writers.

“All journalists need to be entrepreneurs these days,” she said. “You need to look at the process and see what it looks like. Decide what the gap is in consumer needs and how we fill it because it is up to all of us to determine what the future looks like.”

Pitches focus on access to information

Photo courtesy of UNC

Molly Riesenberger, Hannah Henry and Sam Doughton presented their idea for Varsity NC at the Reese News Lab pitch day. The news platform is designed to encourage coverage of local high school sports.

Four teams developed a concept and prototype for a media-related product. The teams then presented their pitches to a panel of venture capitalists and others with an interest in the future of media.

The product pitches were:

1.       Varisty NC. A news platform covering North Carolina high school sports.

2.       Informateen. The video news explainer targets teenagers and provides a catalyst for classroom discussion on current events.

3.       News Pass. This media “wallet” provides access to a variety of sites, allowing customers to pay one time for original content without having to go to sign up for multiple sites.

4.       Fed Up.  This app was the only pitch not directly related to media. It allows customer to find restaurants that cater to different allergies.

Targeting prep sports

For senior Sam Doughton, a reporting and political science major, the project was an opportunity to address what he sees as an underserved area of journalism: prep sports.

“When I was in high school, the Winston-Salem Journal had three full-time prep reporters,” said the Winston-Salem native. “Now, they just have one full-time prep reporter.”

Reese News Lab

This was the problem Doughton’s team set out to solve with the news platform The Varsity NC. The group found that more and more newspapers are not allocating resources to high school sports.

“We thought there was room for a media outlet to step in and really fill the void a lot of these communities have in prep reporting and get more people interested in high school sports,” said Doughton.

His group recommended a non-profit business model reliant upon grants to recruit and employ reporters who would focus on high school sports throughout North Carolina.

The panel of judges weighed in on the team’s idea.

“They grilled us pretty hard,” he said. “They had some tough questions. Where would the reporters be coming from. What types of stories would we cover? How were we going to advertise and spread the word? How were we going to pay for everything?”

While the questions were tough, Doughton appreciated the experience and the teachers’ expertise. In addition to Sheppard, Abby Reimer and Shannon Bowen, both with The McClatchy Company publishing group, guided the students through the process.

“The feedback we received was great, and you could feel that they knew their stuff,” said Doughton. “We could bounce feedback off of people in the media, and they wanted us to succeed.”

For Doughton it was a valuable learning experience. “I have never done anything like this before. You learn a lot about what works and what doesn’t.

“The process is helpful for a lot of things,” he said. “What is the need? Who has the need? Students need to think about these concepts. I think this is the most important part of the class.”