Participants will learn about product development and prototyping

RJI has launched a seminar series to equip 2019–20 Student Innovation Competition participants with relevant information needed to develop verification tools to fight against deep fakes and fabricated content.

Students who are entering the competition are encouraged to attend the sessions, which begin Sept. 26, and will cover subjects including product development, prototyping and innovation.

The 2019-20 RJI Student Innovation Competition is open to all U.S. college students. Teams must have at least one journalism or communication student and be ready to develop a tool that could be used by a news outlet. Teams have the chance to win up to $10,000.

Watch the RJI website and social media channels for information on further sessions, yet to be announced.

About the sessions

Seminar 1: Innovation is about people, not technology

4 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 26 in Fred W. Smith Forum

(This session will also be livestreamed on RJI’s Facebook page.)

The key to creating great products, especially great new products, is understanding what needs customers (or readers) are trying to solve. People are complicated, but developers can understand how to align ideas and products with customers’ needs through simple methods and strategies. Damon Kiesow, Knight Chair in Digital Editing and Producing, at the Missouri School of Journalism will talk about human-centered design, prototyping, empathy interviews and balancing the desirability of a product with the feasibility of building it and the sustainability of its business model.

Kiesow is a digital media pioneer who specializes in aligning storytelling, innovation and business strategies. He has focused his career on energizing newsroom practices and business strategies with emerging technologies. He most recently served as director of Product for McClatchy in Raleigh, North Carolina, working with a chain of local media companies from California to Pennsylvania. While there, he reorganized the Product group to better align business goals with reader needs and created the company’s first product design and user- experience research team.

For more information, visit RJI’s Facebook event link.

Seminar 2: This is why we prototype

4 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 9 in Fred W. Smith Forum

(This session will also be livestreamed on RJI’s Facebook page.)

How can developers build the right product? They won’t know for sure until they put it into the hands of the people who will actually use it. But developers also can’t spend all of their time and resources building the final product just to validate the original idea.

In this seminar James Gordon, senior editor in RJI’s Innovation and Futures Lab, will discuss why and how developers prototype new product ideas, drawing on human-centered design methods. Gordon will also introduce competition participants to a few prototyping tools to help them take product ideas from good to great.

For more information about this seminar session, visit the Facebook event link.

Learn more about the RJI Student Competition on RJI’s website.