Welcome to News and Participatory Media, no longer an experimental course, now officially MAS 700. This blog serves as home base of the class, the place where assignments are posted and commented on, and home for the syllabus and other readings.

News and Participatory Media is a workshop-based class, where we’ll be creating some of the tools and tactics that allow people making news – from established print newspapers to individuals with a phone and a twitter feed – to embrace what’s best of the world of participatory media while navigating around some of the icebergs. For the first half of the class, students will be reporting stories using a variety of tools and tactics. For the second half, we’ll be designing and testing new tools and tactics. Reading back through this blog will give you a sense for some of the projects students produced last year.

The class is open to anyone interested in issues of the future of news, but works especially well with students who either have a background in journalism, or in developing software – some of the most interesting projects happened last year when students who could code worked with students who had deep knowledge of a thorny set of journalistic issues.

Think you might be interested? First class is Wednesday, February 6, at 2pm in the Media Lab, E15-363. The syllabus we’re using is located here.