A grant awarded to faculty members of the Walter Cronkite School will soon make it easier for students to find jobs accessible via light rail.
The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication awarded Cronkite faculty members Nancie Dodge and Serena Carpenter a Bridge Grant to fund research that will help add job-listing information for businesses along the light rail to the CityCircles iPhone application, which launched this summer.
“One thing (my students) continually tell me is that they can’t pick a job unless it’s near the light rail,” assistant professor Serena Carpenter said. “We were thinking it would be great if there was classifieds for jobs just around the light rail.”
The grants, which provide up to $8,000, are intended “to implement these projects in ways that enhance the education of future journalists for the new media landscape,” according to AEJMC’s website.
CityCircles, created by 2001 Cronkite graduate Adam Klawonn and W.P. Carey alumna Aleksandra Chojnacka with a $95,000 Knight News Challenge grant awarded in 2009, provides business and event information for each stop on the light-rail route. It also provides schedules and estimated locations of the light-rail trains.
From July 2009 through 2010, CityCircles received $100,700 from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
Students from the honors section of Carpenter’s online media class and at least one section of Dodge’s advanced online media class will conduct the research as part of their classwork over the coming semesters. The information will be presented to the team at CityCircles, which will then design a jobs-listing feature for the app.
Klawonn currently manages the content on the app and heads the team at CityCircles.
“I hope it’s one more thing that makes the light-rail community tighter and more cohesive,” Klawonn said. “Having a jobs-listing function is just one more piece of the puzzle that can help (the app) sustain itself, both by keeping the community going and also keeping the project going and keep evolving with the community.”
Key to the success of the jobs-listing function will be cooperation from the businesses providing those jobs.
“We know that business cooperation may be a problem, but we’re trying to make it easy for them to submit job ads through the CityCircle site,” Carpenter said. “Our key feature with the app is to make it easy as possible for employers to submit their classified to the CityCircle website.”
That feature will include an online form that businesses can use to post job openings directly to the CityCircles website.
Journalism junior Devin Fratus said that an app like this could come in handy when searching for jobs.
“When I look for jobs, proximity to the light rail is something I consider a lot, and I do my own research for it to see what’s available, then I have to see what’s the closest light-rail stop,” Fratus said. “Something that could expedite that process could be quite helpful.”
The CityCircles team is talking to developers who work with the Android mobile operating system to create a compatible version. The app is currently free in the iTunes App Store, but Klawonn hopes to eventually offer a paid premium version.
According to Carpenter, the jobs-listing feature will be launched sometime in the fall of 2013.
Contact the reporter at pmelbour@asu.edu
