Idea by Subina
Design by Drew
Comments by Kyountae

Idea: a simple alarm clock app

I’m Anne Crosby, and I am a first year student in Harvard Divinity School’s master of theological studies (MTS) program. I am focusing on Chinese politics, ethics, and religion.

I majored in History and East Asian Studies as an undergraduate and went on to earn a masters degree in information science. After teaching at the post-secondary level in California and earning an Ed.M., I decided to combine my interest in technology with my background in East Asian and pursue yet another masters degree.

I’m certainly not a master programmer, but I have basic coding experience, UI, and web design skills. For me the internet is about culture and human interaction—technology is a means but not an end. This course is exciting because it will be an opportunity to collaborate with some amazing classmates. I have no experience in journalism, but I love putting my info. science background to work sifting through tidbits of information and connecting the dots.

I am a consummate traveler and take every opportunity to explore the world outside of the US, spending most of my time in South and East Asia; however, Antarctica is the most incredible place I have visited. Amazing.

Things I think about sometimes:

• <i>What’s</i> the news that’s fit to print?
• <i>Who</i> the heck printed that anyway?
• Also:
o Soft power, propaganda, transnational trolling
o Networks of trust
o The role of local/localized news in civic engagement
o Net neutrality and censorship
o Internet sovereignty vs. a free and open internet

I am a religion reporter and I feel like we don’t have a great, organic understanding of religion’s role in America today. I’d like to find a way to study social media data that would help me understand where the true power centers/ideas/players are, to map out American Religion in 2017.

Here is a link to my work:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/michelle-boorstein/?utm_term=.7171a46bc141

The endless stream of information and content provided by social media is the worlds’s greatest gift to a reporter or researcher and also his or her worst nightmare. As helpful and empowering as crowdsourcing this kind of newsgathering or research can be, if your job is to corroborate that information it can present a minefield. How to verify the overwhelming flow of information, particularly in a breaking news, high volume context such as violence during massive demonstrations or in a conflict zone? We’ve all seen (and perhaps disparaged) people who have shared images from one conflict zone incorrectly labeled as another, whether by honest mistake or as part of a concerted propaganda campaign. But it’s all too easy to be duped by such material, particularly if shared widely in a high pressure, deadline-looming situation.

A number of people and organizations have sought to tackle this problem by creating various kinds of verification tools. A recent one is NewsCheck, a Chrome extension launched by First Draft, a coalition of organizations and places like the Google News Lab working on tools to improve skills and standards in online reporting.

The extension is a web-friendly version of a previously published guide to verification for photos and videos and essentially works by presenting the user with a checklist of considerations to run through: Are you looking at the original version? Do you know who captured the image? Do you know where the image was captured? Do you know when the image was captured? The app scores the user based on the answers and these results can be published alongside the embedded image on the intended website so that other users can see for themselves to what extent it has been possible to authenticate the information. This isn’t a perfect fix obviously and I would love to see this tool expanded to automatically feed into to some of the best and most vetted online authentication tools available, as sometimes the number of tools can be as overwhelming as the amount of content and further curation is always helpful. But it’s a nice step to attempt to systematize basic verification into workflows for anyone sharing this kind of content and to increase transparency on these efforts to readers/viewers.

After reading through the example articles on tools for journalism and storytelling, it struck me that there are so, so many resources out there for journalists. How do you keep track of all these items while collaborating with colleagues? Slack, a tool first widely adopted by the tech community, has features that will help journalists work together effectively and efficiently. It’s a messaging and collaboration tool for teams that is being rapidly adopted across industries.

• Use channels for topic specific conversations – These channels could be specific stories or even elements within a story. They can be public with your entire team or private to a specific group of people.
• Contact team members directly for one-on-one conversations using direct messaging and one-in-one calls.
• Easily share and upload files.
• Use search to easily find information. The files you upload are indexed, so search even works within PDFs.
• Use Slack integrations, like twitter and google alerts, to quickly see relevant information in appropriate channels.

Slack is primarily meant for teams and workplaces, but can be used informally also, among just a few collaborators or across many dispersed journalists. Some newsrooms, including Vox and The Associated Press, are already using the tool for collaboration. Is can also be used more widely across organizations. For example, Muckrock created a Slack team, which has recently become very popular, to help investigative journalists to retrieve data and documents from the government through the Freedom of Information Act.

Hi All!