City Research Online

Abstract

Although journalism is classified as one of the creative industries, there is little bespoke digital support for creative thinking by journalists. To fill the gap, this paper reports new research that led to the implementation and first evaluation of JUICE, a new digital prototype to support creative thinking by journalists during the early development of news stories. Emerging from a user centred design process, JUICE is implemented as a simple Add-on Sidebar and Dialog Box in Google Docs that a journalist can invoke when developing news stories. Interviews with experienced journalists were used to elicit 6 strategies that JUICE uses to guide its users to generate different angles on news stories using creative information searches and interactive creativity support. In this paper we describe the information search algorithm and new interactive support to create news stories with one of these strategies – the individual human angle on the story – then report a first evaluation of JUICE implemented with the algorithm and support during its use by journalism students. Results revealed that most of these student journalists were able use JUICE to generate new news stories with individual human angles in a short period of time, but still used established web search tools to collect more detailed information about the angle in order to write the story. Journalist feedback was used to improve the usability of JUICE and design new interactive features.

Publication Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Subjects:	Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
Departments:	School of Science & Technology > Computer Science > Human Computer Interaction Design

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