CHENNAI: The second edition of the Global Popup Newsroom project involving journalism students from four countries kickstarted in the city on Saturday. The project, which has garnered the attention of the UNESCO and the MIT, this time took up the theme of ‘food’ during the 24-hour live journalism project.
The project is a collaboration between the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai and their counterparts from the Newcastle University, UK, the California State University, US, and the Rafik Hariri University, Lebanon. Under the project, the concept of popup newsrooms is explored. This involves a temporary virtual newsroom which, according to its creators, “literally pops up when events occur, covers them, then hibernates until the next event.”
The newsroom essentially consists of a website on which news stories on a particular topic are put up. The stories are then circulated through Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites. With the news reported through new age gadgets like tabs and cellphones and stories coming in a variety of forms including audio, video, slideshows and others, the Popup newsroom’s advantage remains its low cost, flexibility and new generation friendly. The Pop-Up newsroom on Saturday, saw stories about malnutrition in old-age homes in Chennai to community gardens in LA, stories of homeless women’s struggle for food to food trucks that bring in business for niche bakeries. This year, the students will go a step further by bringing in solution oriented follow-up stories.
“This is a new concept called newsroom Engage. While students would first go to the field and do stories on all information available in the first phase, in the next stage they will take these stories to stakeholders to help bring out ideas on solutions,“ said Priya Rajasekar, media coordinator with ACJ.