Student Web news 'cool,' interesting
By Leah Franklin

Take some Web-savvy college students, put them in a high-tech computer lab and ask them to devise a Web news site from the ground up for their peers. Then stand back.

The result, known as blurrnews, launched in beta version on May 1. A team of students will create a new version of the site through this summer for a full launch in August coordinated with the start of the 2003-04 academic year.

An alternative publication directed at 18- to 24-year-olds, blurrnews is an interactive Web site aiming to provide international news and lifestyles features submitted from around the world.

At blurrnews.org, users encounter six categories: news, art and design, film, music, random and "blatantly commercial" – a space for corporate sponsors to test ideas and receive feedback. Each category currently contains links to other online publications, but the goal is for blurrnews eventually to provide all original material. While the students who designed blurrnews hope to attract works from college students, they say that anyone can submit work to the site for publication.

"News and other items of interest to 18- to 24-year-olds does not necessarily need to come from 18- to 24-year olds," said master's student Sylvia Razgova, a member of the blurrnews team. As the home page says, the focus of blurrnews is "the world, relevance, intelligence, truth and the free flow of information to anyone who wants to wake up and stay awake." The students' definition of news was anything interesting to them and also "cool," according to School instructors who assisted with the effort.

Articles range from aboriginal art in Australia to networking receptions in Austin, Texas. Students share music, documentary films and artwork. In the "blatantly commercial" section, corporations are encouraged to advertise their products. The category was created because the students believe U.S. media too often allow corporations to influence the news.

"We are not mixing news and commercials," said Razgova, who worked on the design and contributed photography.

Razgova and nine other students spent long hours debating what was important to young adults. They discovered that people in the 18-24 age group are distrustful of the media because of corporate ownership. They also found that age group to be interested in international news. "Whatever they do, they've got passion," Razgova said. "Kids who create want to be seen and heard."

Most of the works come from students, said Jane Crayton, an astrophysics and fine arts major who worked on the project. The online publication plans to use word-of-mouth and other tactics to advertise the magazine. She said the magazine is looking for work from contributors in any age group, as long as it appeals to 18- to 24-year-olds.

Students in the School's Experience Design Workshop created the Web site. Their original intention was to enter The One Show advertising competition. The question put to them by the "client" for the competition, the Newspaper Association of America, was, "How do you get 18- to 24-year-olds to read the newspaper?" The students decided to create an ad campaign for an alternative site. That site eventually became the semester-long focus of the class.

"It started as a little inspiration while working on something else," said Tim Hawkins, associate director of the digital-innovation lab in the Armory named b l u r r, from which blurrnews draws its name. It was established three years ago when Omnicom gave a $1 million grant to the journalism school. "We used it to create a space for innovative teaching of interactive design as well as to fund and foster research in new media," Hawkins said. "In many respects, we treat the Experience Design Workshop like a business. Students are assigned roles and responsibilities. It is a very demanding environment."

Students have access to the computer lab 24 hours a day, seven days a week. "It's always a lot of fun for me to come in at 3 o'clock in the morning and find students working," Hawkins said.

"While I've been out on the town, they've been working in the lab."

In the fall, the class will be restructured to mimic an online magazine staff. Working as a team, each student will be "hired" for a specific job such as art director, production manager, foreign correspondent or regional editor. Students plan to refresh blurrnews content monthly.

Hawkins, who co-taught the class with Associate Professor David Slayden, said he looks forward to teaching the class solo in the fall and functioning as blurrnews managing editor, drawing from lessons learned in spring semester as well as from his experience as a photojournalism teaching assistant and 10 years on a national magazine staff.

"By throwing students into these situations and seeing how they handle it, we learn a lot about how students learn," he said.