Medill Ups Its Hacker Street Cred

Last week Medill’s WriteClick initiative announced some forward-looking projects that made me feel some pride in the progress my alma mater has made in the last few years.

The projects:

Tweedia, a widget that will allow readers to instantly see other relevant Twitter posts on news stories.

Machine Generated Sports Stories, a program that instantly “writes” stories about baseball games, drawing on data scraped from box scores and play-by-plays online.

EasyWriter, a Microsoft Word plug-in that will allow writers to make refined web searches within Word.

Twitter Publishing, an application that will allow media companies to send news links to interested Twitter users, based on what they post.

News Feed, an iPhone web application that utilizes time-driven news feeds to give time-constrained readers a more efficient way to read the news.

The Time article “Can Computer Nerds Save Journalism?” sums it up beautifully:

A cadre of newly minted media whiz kids, who mix high-tech savvy with hard-nosed reporting skills, are taking a closer look at ways in which 21st century code-crunching and old-fashioned reporting can not only coexist but also thrive. And the first batch of them has just emerged from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

A hearty congratulations to @richgor and all of the other faculty and students who have contributed to these projects.