From Start to Finish: Methodology

We have worked together on this project from Day 1 in September 2008, and have seen our project evolve significantly along the way. In September, we were absolutely not doing a project on The Future of Journalism. While we were always interested in the future per se, we originally wanted to create a television news show, with the help of Tufts' own student television group TUTV that would offer solutions for problems we saw with today's television news. We worried about the sensationalism dominating the airwaves and proposed to develop a 30-minute news magazine that reformatted today’s standard news cast such to once again make it compelling and informative to watch.

We ran with this idea throughout our first semester senior project colloquium, all the while reading sources on television news presentation that might give us inspiration in designing our final product. We scoured today’s newscasts in hopes that we could concretely identify something “wrong” which our program would remedy. At the suggestion of our advisor Howard Woolf, we dutifully took notes on the television coverage of the November 4th presidential election (the photo below is us at CMS’s election-viewing bash).

We returned to campus in January having completed additional research over winter break. Yet we still felt that, despite multiple ideas, we hadn’t landed on a vision we could nurture and devote ourselves to second semester. Our research suggested that internet television would continue to grow, and we began to play around with the idea of creating an internet television show in lieu of a traditional broadcast program. This complemented our desire to show “what’s next” but there was one small problem; we had neither the technical expertise nor the budget to create an internet TV show that would accurately reflect our futuristic mental picture. Yes, we could have done a YouTube-style podcast, but that would lack the level of quality that we were envisioning. I distinctly remember Howard telling us in a meeting that Steven Spielberg spent millions to develop the ultramodern technologies in his movie Minority Report. How were we going to show something futuristic with limited background in web design, limited budget and more notably, limited time?

The answer we arrived at in late January was, quite simply, we weren’t. Howard saw us continually hitting the wall and pointed out to us what we had failed to see: the general theme running through all of our ideas was the future of television. That was the spring board for our current project. We decided instead to do a research project on the future of television news, which then mushroomed into a focus on the future of journalism once we realized the intrinsic linkage between television news and other types of news outlets like newspapers.

With a concrete topic in hand, we launched anew into our research, this time by actively following the journalism community online. We also secured interviews with experts such as Ellen Hume, Research Director of the MIT Center for Future Civic Media, Dan Kennedy, an assistant professor of journalism at Northeastern University, columnist for the Guardian and author of the blog Media Nation, and Michael Goldman, senior consultant at the Government Insight Group, and John Van Scoyoc, the producer of Broadside News with Jim Braude at New England Cable News.

Another notable milestone was our trip to Mediabistro's TV Newser Summit on the Future of Television News in New York on March 10, funded through Tufts' Undergraduate Research Fund. We boarded at bus at 6:30 a.m., and traveled four hours to New York, made our way to the conference, which lasted all afternoon, and then jumped back on a bus to Boston at 8:30 p.m. Below is a shot of the conference room.

TVNewser's own photographer also snapped us bright and early at the TVNewser Summit, and we ended up on Mediabistro’s Flickr feed (see below).

However, we did more than follow the conversation; we became part of it. Esther and Kelley both created Twitter accounts in February and through them, were able to “follow” and in certain cases, exchange ideas with influencers like Paul Bradshaw, a blogger who lectures in online journalism at Birmingham University. Also crucial to entering the conversation was establishing our own blog, The Bugler, in March to discuss the future of content delivery, journalism business models, and other developments in the field.

The final dilemma we approached was how to best to structure our presentation such that it reflected our extensive knowledge and engagement with the topic. It posed a difficult challenge because our project did not have a logical final product; we were instead trying to showcase a dialogue. We ultimately decided that one presentation medium would not suit. We did not want to forgo the opportunity of having a visual presentation of content, and decided to create a video on the impact of technology on the news cycle. While both of us brainstormed the general ideas, Esther took a lead on making the actual video using Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, and After Effects. Creating a video was a huge commitment and initiative since each step of the way was very time-consuming.

As a result of our passion to play with multiple platforms, you see a range of components in different forms, all of which address a sub-topic in the broader future of journalism question.