UNC launching a student-produced news site

Coming November 1: reesenews.org.

Designed, developed, programmed and operated by students at UNC’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, reesenews will be an information hub utilizing a mix of traditional and experimental reporting and story forms. Visitors to the site will be able to interact with in-depth and hyper-local journalism, quick-hit information and opinion across a broad range of topics.

Reesenews will explore the definition of journalistic content, which is expanding to include raw data, geo-location, database, gaming, animation and data visualization as means to foster greater understanding of issues by media users.

Articles, video, photographs, audio and interactive informational graphics will be provided by a host of sources: our 19-person student staff, dozens of free-lancers, the curriculum and the community.

We will use this rich content as the foundation for audience research:

  • Using the principles of search engine optimization, search engine marketing and social media, we’ll experiment and study audience behavior patterns
  • Understanding and utilization of metrics and analytics to measure audience behavior and engagement as one of many tools for decision-making in an era of audience choice
  • The students will learn to break down real-time audience trends as the basis for decisions about the content displayed across multiple platforms
  • How the culture communicates: Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and emerging social platforms
  • How we gather news: multimedia journalism, beatblogging, methods of crowdsourcing like directed reporting, collaborative reporting and open-source reporting
  • The form and function of information platforms: tablet technology, HTML5, the user experience.

The 19 members of the Reese Felts student staff fill roles ranging from managing editor to directors of content, audience engagement and interactive design to multimedia journalist to platform producer to multi-platform developer.

Reesenews, the browser-based site, will be followed quickly by smartphone and tablet applications to capture untethered audiences.