A Ball State University institute announced it will provide money to four faculty research projects to study media-related issues.
The News Research Institute (NRI) will give $20,000 to the projects, institute director Chris Bavender said.
There were 10 proposals submitted, and a five-person committee announced on Nov. 10 which projects it felt are the best to help look into the future of news, she said.
"All the proposals were fantastic, but we just didn't have enough money to fund every one," Bavender said. "I wish we could have funded them all. We want them to re-submit next go-around."
BLOGS AND NEWSPAPERS
Blogs and Audience Engagement will examine the use of political blogs in newspapers and how the readers and reporters interact through methods such as posting comments on message boards, journalism professor Mary Spillman said.
Spillman and her colleagues will examine how people respond to the blogs, how much they interact and the discussion topics, she said.
"We construct and deliver news in new ways because TV and newspapers are not the only options for news consumption anymore," she said. "Readers are more empowered today."
The research and analysis is expected to be completed within a year, Spillman said.
HIGH SCHOOL MEDIA
The North Central High School Project will be a combined effort between Ball State faculty, Indianapolis Star staff and North Central's news publications to improve the high school's Web site and install a news feed, Marilyn Weaver, chairwoman of the Department of Journalism, said.
"Younger people are not consuming as much news as we would like," she said.
The objective is to help increase the students' news consumption as well as conduct research, Weaver said. One of the program's goals is to determine if students will become more civically involved with more news consumption, she said.
The project was already started before the grant was announced and its researchers hope to have it completed by January, Weaver said.
NEWS FEEDS
The Community-Centered, Personalized News Aggregator will be a Really Simple Syndication (RSS) news feed exclusive to Ball State students and faculty, Paul Buis, chairman of the Department of Computer Science, said.
The site will use data-mining, an information gathering technique used by Web sites such as Google and Amazon.com, to determine each reader's preferences about the type of news they enjoy most, Buis said. The site will then direct the reader to articles on news sites, such as CNN, which will be about topics the reader is most interested in, he said.
"This will decrease time and increase relevance," Buis said. "It's news in a much more organized way."
The project is hoped to be completed within a year and a half, Buis said.
ONLINE NEWSPAPERS
WebFirst v1.1 is already in its final stages, as students from a special topics course, conducted by journalism instructor Jennifer George-Palilonis and assistant professor Lori Demo, began the project last spring, Palilonis said.
The program partnered with the Palladium-Item newspaper in Richmond to develop models and routines to do Web-based stories, Palilonis said.
The class worked with a newspaper with a staff of 24 journalists and came up with online models and templates for small newspapers.
"We have just a little bit more left to do now," Palilonis said. "They [the students] worked really hard. There is still one chapter of the final multimedia piece left."
Each project will require a different amount of funding, and some will also use external funding to conduct the research, Bavender said.
The funding for the NRI projects is part of a $20 million grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. and is one of four institutes that were created from it, Bavender said.
"The way people want their news is changing," Bavender said. "That is what the NRI wants to study."
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