Team Crunchberry and newsnixer.us.

I was fortunate to be in the room today when this group of cool kids from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, Team Crunchberry, gave their presentation today to a group from Gazette Communications on their project NewsMixer.

I tried, with the help of The Gazette editor Steve Buttry, to live blog the presentation . It went OK, at best. My first live blog experience so it could have been better. Let me know what you think.

Here’s more information from Team Crunchberry on their project.

Tuesday, Dec. 9, the Medill New Media Publishing Project (Team Crunchberry) will present an exciting new Web site designed to get young adults engaged in the news through online discussion and their social relationships.

The site has been built during Medill’s fall quarter by a team of master’s students in our interactive sequence. Two of the students are experienced computer programmers attending Medill through a unique scholarship program designed to bring technologists into the journalism field.

The Web site the team has built is designed to address some of the most interesting challenges and opportunities confronting media and journalism in the 21st century:
· Getting young adults interested in local news
· Enabling genuine, productive online conversations regarding the news
· Building communities of news users
· Leveraging the value of online social networks (Facebook, MySpace, etc.) to improve journalism

The site has been developed in collaboration with Gazette Communications in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, owner of the Gazette newspaper and KCRG-TV. It will be one of the first sites in the world to take advantage of Facebook Connect, a new tool that allows Facebook users to log into other sites and connect there with their social networks.