SJN recently launched a commercial television initiative with newsrooms in 14 markets across the U.S. The RJI Fellowship will help send a respected TV news professional into those newsrooms to flesh out solutions projects while also gathering data for a playbook and metrics to share with other broadcasters.

Virginia Arrigucci and four AP colleagues from the news and business sides of the company will study how push notifications on the AP’s website and mobile app can bring more value to users and how other publishers can do the same.

Michael Epstein will work with a news outlet to produce an expandable audio story and build tools that newsrooms can use to create Expandable Audio Journalism content for a range of smart speakers.

Krystal Knapp will create a guide for small, independent publishers showing why push notifications are a great fit for their local news businesses.

Fellowship to ‘set the stage’ to pilot information districts

RJI Fellow Simon Galperin is proposing a new business model for news he believes will not only help fund an operating budget but also involve readers more intimately: community information districts.

Madeleine Bair, a journalist and human rights documentarian, wants to bridge the divide between mainstream and ethnic media. She will prototype El Tímpano, a mobile news bulletin for working-class Latino immigrants in northern California, and develop tools to help others engage with underserved news audiences.

Pam Dempsey, executive director of the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting, will co-lead a team of data journalists and computer scientists who will develop a searchable, interactive database that will help journalists report on large multinational agribusiness companies and provide insights into the many ways these giant companies affect a community, a state and the world. Her co-leader will be Brant Houston, a professor and Knight Chair in Investigative Reporting at the University of Illinois.

Christopher Guess, a technologist and journalist, will add important new features to Push, an open-source mobile news app designed to make it easier or possible for small news organizations to provide a user-friendly mobile news solution. Research based on the usage of the app will also be conducted and shared with the industry.

Mike Wheeler, managing partner of Westerly Partners, and David Danto, director of emerging technologies for Interactive Multimedia and Collaborative Communications Alliance, will design and test new low-cost, scalable video recording and archiving systems based on emerging technologies for public community meetings and events. By lowering the cost and complexity, they intend for their solutions to become an essential part of community journalism.

PolitiFact, a political claim and fact-checking website published by the Tampa Bay Times, created a new online tool to document the promises made by President Donald Trump during his campaign and track whether he stays true to those promises in the White House. Journalists can also use the promise-tracking tool to categorize the promises of local or state politicians. PolitiFact Executive Director Aaron Sharockman led the project.