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| Dissemination of news is increasingly moving from paper to electronic forms of delivery, due in large part to the Internet and the proliferation of handheld communication devices. While ease of access has improved, management and reliability of content has become more problematic. It is thus more important than ever that content management systems for online news delivery are designed to support reliable and accurate journalism. A content management system is a software system that enables organization, control, and publication of a variety of media. Such a system is especially vital to web publishing, where manuscripts are kept in electronic form rather than as traditional hard copy. Electronic versions can be difficult to edit, maintain, and keep organized as they go through a layered editorial process. A well-designed content management system can help alleviate the problem by automating the editorial routing, and providing online tools for collaborative reporting and editorial feedback. New computing and communications technologies have transformed the news industry, giving rise to profound questions about the business models, work practices, and civic mission of newsgathering and distribution. While there is a consensus among industry leaders that journalists must become technologically literate, and that technological innovation is essential to the fulfillment of the ethical and economic imperatives of the industry, there is much less agreement about how those goals can be accomplished. The faculty mentors on this project play leading roles in the academic, professional, and industry circles in which these issues are being addressed. The project incorporates current best practices in computing and journalism such as a reliance on self-managed teams, conceptualizing news as structured data, and creating a culture of collaboration between computer scientists, media designers, and journalists. Moreover, it affords opportunities for genuine innovation by allowing students to collaborate in the creation of new computing tools for journalism, the newsroom, and classrooms of the future. An ancillary benefit is that the project will impart civic values such as privacy, accuracy, and ethics at a time that many of our students are becoming publishers via facebook, MySpace and other social computing networks. The faculty mentors on this proposal, Pearson, Wolz, and Pulimood, have been collaborating for the past few years on defining collaborative environments. In this project, the students will collaborate, with guidance from the mentors, to investigate problems related to collaborative writing for an online magazine; content generation, management, and security; feedback mechanisms; and usability of content management systems. Over the next year we plan to continue development of CAFÉ (Collaboration and Facilitation Environment), a content management system designed to provide a collaborative environment for writing and sharing multimedia story packages to address emergent issues and insights as part of an ongoing project funded through the National Science Foundation Broadening Participation in Computing (NSF-BPC) program. In particular we will focus on developing an abstraction of both the pipeline and presentation structure of an online magazine and tools for managing the writing process, including proofreading, approval process, feedback mechanisms, and usability and accessibility. This project is funded by the Collaborative Research Experience for Undergraduates and the National Science Foundation’s Broadening Participation in Computing program (Grant Number CNS 0739173) |