The Daily Bruin received a $275,000 grant to create a new, innovative Web platform that will allow both students and journalists to interact more freely with content on the paper’s Web site.
The Bruin was one of 16 organizations to receive grants from the Knight Foundation through its News Challenge contest.
The contest provides funding for digital projects that impact community life, according to its Web site.
Anthony Pesce, current Daily Bruin news editor, and Dharmishta Rood, current photo editor, applied for the grant in hopes of making the Bruin’s Web site more accessible and helpful to both the student body and the paper’s staff.
“We want to create a publishing platform that will empower student newspapers to reach out to their communities in ways they haven’t been able to before,” Pesce said.
Pesce and Rood officially accepted the grant at the Interactive Media Conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday.
“It’s been very exciting,” Pesce said.
The Bruin’s new Web site is expected to launch in early 2009. It will incorporate social-networking technology to allow users to customize and interact with the paper’s content.
Users will be able to obtain personal logins, which will allow them to prioritize certain types of content, such as sports stories or opinion columns.
“As college students, we don’t have time to read everything we want or do everything we want,” Rood said. “This will let readers streamline the way they interact with content.”
Additionally, readers will be able to rank stories and comment on all content, including photos.
Student groups will also be able to create profiles on the new site, and post events on a master calendar.
Rood and Pesce said these features will benefit both groups trying to publicize themselves and journalists trying to improve news coverage.
“It gives student organizations a real site on our Web site where they can market themselves,” Pesce said. “The newsroom will be able to access and mine data from (the content) the community is creating. … It allows us to really mobilize.”
The Bruin’s grant comes at a time when many newspapers across the country, both college and professional, are struggling to find ways to innovate on the Internet.
The rise of the World Wide Web has spelled trouble for print newspapers in the form of falling circulation and advertising revenue. In response, many publications are increasingly moving toward interactive, customizable Web sites in an attempt to attract readers.
A main objective of the Knight News Challenge is to create new technology that can be used by publications around the world. To that end, the Bruin’s new Web platform will be open source, meaning the codes will be visible to anyone.
“We’re excited that young people want to use their ideas and skills to help inform people in new ways and help those people create stronger communities,” said Eric Newton, vice president of the Knight Foundation’s journalism program, in a statement.
Rood and Pesce said they have been formulating their ideas for some time, largely because of industry trends.
“We’ve been talking about these ideas for almost a year,” Rood said. “We were planning out all these features and then later we ended up … realizing we could actually get funding.”