Keynote speaker Matt Boogie challenged the attendees to imagine a future where information is freed from specific constraints of individual devices. He asked his audience to think beyond ubiquitous computing to see a future of what he termed ‘atmospheric computing.’ In this view of the future, devices broadcast nearly as much information to each other as they receive from traditional media partners.

I had a chance to speculate about what journalism schools (including Medill) should be doing on a great panel with Cindy Royal, of Texas State at San Marcos, and Lisa Williams, Placeblogger. We pondered, argued and agreed about the role of the ‘mythical unicorn’ — the journalism student/professional who reports, codes and designs.

I argued that learning to code is no harder than learning AP style and that teaching students to report and code is no different than learning to report and write. Both are just forms of distribution.

You can read a fun write up of the entire conference on College Media Matters, sponsored by the Associated College Press.

Also Dave Stanton‘s For Journalism KickStarter project had a strong presence [disclosure note: I'm an instructional reviewer and backer of the project]. The online code/journalism concept fit in nicely with the strong instructional bent of the conference.

We, Tyler Fisher and I, decided to have a little fun with NPR’s Election Night Scorecard. With Brian Boyer‘s blessing, we helped along the NPR news app team’s scorecard to its natural conclusion: an old-school, NES-style.

To best enjoy the night’s election results the way they are meant to be seen, just drag the bookmarklet button below to into your bookmarks bar. Then head on over to the NPR Election Night Scorecard, click your bookmarklet and you’re set.

Update – Mentions in the media:

• Poynter Online: 5 really cool things we saw on election night
• Mashable: NPR’s 8-Bit Election Site Is Awesome

Over the last 18 months we’ve explored questions of how users consume news on tablets. This research tracked reading on iPads based on three different navigation paradigms: Traditional, Carousel and Tile. Inside each of the three prototypes, the prototypes all use the same 20 stories with identical presentations to better test how different media types – text, photos, video and graphics – vary the reading experience.

The presentation of findings will be streamed live today and will be available as an archive for later viewing.

And join us on Facebook more information about the study and the ongoing work or on Poynter Online.

You can also see Amy Gahran’s take on the study at USC Annenberg’s Knight Digital Media Center.

Congressional Primaries is a tool showcases innovative technologies online publishers can use to broaden their coverage of elections. The project monitors digital activity associated with races held across Illinois’ 18 congressional districts. This data helps voters learn more about the candidates — telling digital stories automatically, without the input or analysis that normally comes from professional reporters.

Learn more about the project.

We discuss teaching the latest techniques, creating common languages with different kinds of students and how to prepare students for jobs we cannot yet imagine. Listen to the podcast and let us know what you think.

We are aware that, as with any research study, there are so many variables that we can test effectively. But the prototype that has been prepared addresses many of the key issues, some of which will have to be tested not through EyeTrack specifically, but by observation at the test centers, and through exit interviews. Nonetheless, because so much of this material is new, I am certain that any information that the new Poynter EyeTrack can provide will be welcome, and will contribute to stimulate the discussion.

We will be conducting some of the first round of testing at Medill over the next couple of weeks. More updates to come. For now, if you are interested in the EyeTrack project you can also follow the research on our Facebook page.

Congressional Primaries is a tool showcases innovative technologies online publishers can use to broaden their coverage of elections. The project monitors digital activity associated with races held across Illinois’ 18 congressional districts. This data helps voters learn more about the candidates — telling digital stories automatically, without the input or analysis that normally comes from professional reporters.

Many Illinois congressional primary races are not heavily covered. The candidates make few traditional, public statements — speeches or press conferences — and voters are forced to make decisions without much information about the candidates. Congressional Primaries is a set of tools designed to help inform voters by analyzing the available information, mostly through social media.
Congressional Primaries merges technology and visual storytelling, with three key tools: insights gleaned from social media, like Facebook and Twitter, easy-to-understand narratives told through campaign finance data, and the discovery of relevant information through automated aggregations — all in a user friendly, web app experience.

Key features include:

• Candidate profiles offer a social media perspective on the traditional “short bio” found on many news websites. Information from Facebook, Twitter and the candidate’s own web sites are imported into congressionalprimaries.com. Basic biographical data and photos that the candidates’ post on their Facebook pages is automatically imported into a database, for review and trimming by an editor.
• ‘What the Candidate Tweets’ analyzes the content of each candidate’s tweets and categorizes each tweet by political topic. This analysis is visualized as a weighted pie chart that accounts for the likelihood that a Tweet was correctly categorized.
• ‘What the Followers Tweet’ analyzes sample tweets from Twitter followers of the candidates, categorizing them by broad topics. The analysis is visualized as a line graph showing changing patterns over the preceding seven days.
• Contributor analysis uses the geographical location of campaign donations from the Federal Elections Commission to describe where a candidate’s support comes from, both within Illinois and outside it. This information is visualized as both a pie chart, tab chart and a map of contributions by zip code — for donations inside Illinois.
• Congressional Primaries is organized around web pages for each district’s party races and around bios for each candidate. Users can access the information either by browsing, using a state map or even by entering their address.
• These race and candidate pages are also available to other media organizations to include on their own sites, with their own branding and navigation. Several of pieces of this application can be embedded as a widget.

Congressional Primaries’ user-friendly design and innovative set of analysis tools was used by about a dozen different media outlets, including television, radio, print and online publishers. Most of the specific tools seen in the larger system were developed as part of collaborative classes that featured small, interdisciplinary teams of journalism and computer science students working together to solve problems for journalists, publishers or news consumers. The team of students, faculty and lab members who built Congressional Primaries spent about three months improving upon and tying together the student projects.

Society of News Design

The competition was rigorous and the decisions difficult but the five World’s Best Designed are:

• CNN.com: World’s Best-Designed News Web Site
• CNN for iPad: World’s Best Designed News App
• The Globe and Mail: World’s Best-Designed News Web site
• The Guardian for iPhone: World’s Best-Design Mobile App
• NPR for iPad: World’s Best-Designed News App

Just about all of the winning news organizations designed incredible experiences across multiple platforms. Picking which organization on which platform might have been the most difficult part of the judging.

You can read more about the reasoning behind the awards here.

It used to be that calling a journalist a “hack” was considered an insult. Now, tack on “-er” and more than likely the reporter will be flattered. Today tech-savvy journalists are mapping stories, figuring out new ways to share mobile-based news, and changing how investigative reporters gather and analyze their information. This expanding digital landscape for news, especially the significance of data and the promise of mobile, means that computer programming is becoming yet another skill to be taught in journalism classes.

Read more.