Four ASU graduate students working with the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship showcased their innovative digital media projects to a full house in the First Amendment Forum Monday night.
Knight Center director CJ Cornell and Kauffman Professor of Digital Media Entrepreneurship Dan Gillmor introduced the speakers with a prelude on the importance of entrepreneurship in forging the future of journalism.
Gillmor said that entrepreneurialism in the journalism field might soon become more of a need than a want.
“We are partly here to tell folks that here at the journalism school you can invent your own jobs,” Gillmor said. “That’s partly because you may have to.”
The first presenter of the night, Liz Smith, discussed how she had created her program “The Watch Tree” as a means of resolving the difficulties currently faced by those who want to volunteer with local charitable organizations.
“We believe volunteering should be fun and social, to do on a whim on a Saturday afternoon,” Smith said. “We tried to make it spontaneous and convenient.”
Smith discussed how she had utilized Twitter widgets and preexisting technologies in order to make it easy for people to find what volunteer opportunities were happening in their area at a moment’s notice.
“I wanted to make it easier to make a difference,” Smith said.
Following Smith, Adam Klawonn spoke about his project “City Circles” and described how a plotted data system synchronized with the Metro Light Rail could lead to the strengthening of local communication.
“We’re creating content, sharing content with writers, sharing content with people who live in neighborhoods around the rail,” Klawonn said.
Klawonn emphasized that his project embraces the idea of being hyperlocal, because it allows people to upload relevant information to tiny perimeters clustered together in one mass area via mobile uploads.
“The real power of (the project) is the interest in a fixed location and the ability to marry that with technology that lets you know what you want, where you want it and when you want it,” Klawonn said.
While the current project is based on the light rail map, Klawonn said there is no reason his idea could not be adapted on a global level.
“Light rail stations can be anything you want them to be; there’s no reason we can’t do Hawaii and have a City Circles hub for all the surfing spots in Hawaii,” Klawonn said.
Journalism professor and graduate student Amanda Crawford spoke on the nature of portable on-the-go reading, and discussed her program “Fictionado.”
“When people read on the go, they prefer to read things that are short; we change the way we write for mobile devices,” Crawford said.
Crawford said her program aims to act as a hub for short fiction and non-fiction works that can be read or discovered around different parts of the city.
‘“It’s the Netflix for short stories,” Crawford said.
Using an illustrated image of a raven perched above a bar code, Crawford said a person would be able to immediately scan the code and have a short story sent directly to his or her mobile device. Going further, Crawford said one would be able to create an entire literary portfolio of past read works and a Netflix-like queue that would display stories he or she has yet to read.
Film student Marius Ciocirlan closed the evening’s presentation with a discussion of his site “Blimee,” which he said would seek to reestablish the way that readers digest local news.
“Take local news and put it in physical locations while displaying them on physical displays already in your community,” Ciocirlan said.
Ciocirlan said that by using preexisting screen displays already prevalent in everyday life, Blimee would bring the news to readers without making readers have to work to get their content.
At the end of the evening, the four developers took questions from the audience regarding the challenges they faced in making their projects a reality.
“I think the most difficult thing was trying to innovate at the speed of light while you’re working on an idea,” Klawonn said.
Klawonn said that one of the biggest lessons he had learned from his mistakes along the way was that there may be no such thing as a wrong decision.
“I’m not sure I could characterize them as wrong decisions… I think you have to make mistakes to be successful,” Klawonn said.
Contact the reporter at vburnton@asu.edu
