Instructions for the weekly status report!

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Each group should post a weekly status report on the course companion blog. Every course participant has previously gotten an invitation to contribute to the blog.

Do note that except for the weekly status report, you will in a short while be asked to provide some extra information about your group. This info will be used to present the course and the project groups on the course's soon-to-be-created public face - the homepage futureofmedia.se. More info will follow in a separate blog post soon.

Here are the instructions for the weekly status report.

Deadline: Please submit your weekly status report every Friday with the exception of Fri Nov 8 (mid-crit presentations). 

Content of each weekly report:

• Group name. 
• What we have done. What you (your group) have done during the previous week (since the previous weekly report)
• What we will do. What you will do next (next step(s) in your project)
• Problems encountered. Either within the group or in relation to you plans and "external" entities. 
• Changes in the project. "Evolution"/change of direction of your project (optional). If you have altered or changed the direction of your project (compared to the project plan or to previous status report) - please tell us why.
• Resources. We encourage you to also append other materials, for example a photo of your work process, a drawing/diagram you have created or a link to some excellent resource you have encountered (a text or a video for example). 
• Other. Whatever you feel is important or necessary to add to the status report. 

Comment: As stated before, not just the final results, but also the process is important in the course. Please see the weekly status reports not only as us (teachers) examining you (students), but as your opportunity to tell us (and impress us with) what you have done lately in your project group, as well as a backchannel to point out obstacles and problems you have encountered.

If you encounter problems that hinder you to progress in your work as a group, do not hesitate to get in touch with Daniel and Malin as soon as possible so that we can set up a meeting.

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Hand-ins this week (Fri Oct 25)

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To clarify things that have been communicated previously (including at the coordination meeting with all the project leaders yesterday), me and Malin have asked you to hand in the following things this week (today!):

- A revised project plan. We met and discussed your project in the beginning of the week. We think that every group needs to revise their project plans after those meetings (some groups more, other groups less). You should hand them in by mail to Daniel and Malin today at the latest (half the groups have already handed in their revised project plans).
- A short summary of your project. The summary should be "handed in" by publishing it on the new blog that you have all been invited to. That means that you can have a look at what the other groups aim to do in the project. It will be especially interesting for you to find out if your group is "close" to what another group will work with. If you are, you should consider talking to the other group about this. It is ok to overlap some and you might even find synergies (linking up or building on some part of what the other group does), but you shouldn't totally overlap and risk doing the same thing (solve the same problem, suggest the very same solution etc.) as another group.

HOWEVER

at the meeting with the coordination group yesterday, we decided that the short summary (above) should be a text that also people outside of this course can understand. The plan is to use your summary in the website that the executive group will put together to inform about the course and to advertise the final presentation to people in the news industries in an attractive way. For your 300 word summary, you should thus aim at stating what you will do in your project; what is your big idea? What will you look into and how will you do it?
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Project plan review meetings (Mon-Tue Oct 21-22)

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Me and Malin will meet each group for 30 minutes on Monday and Tuesday next week. All meetings will be held in the seminar room 1635 (house E, top floor).

You should spend the time until then discussing and elaborating your project plan. You can choose to send it to us (Daniel and Malin) beforehand by mail or to bring two printed copies of your project plan to the meeting. Here is the schedule:


Monday Oct 21:
- 13.00 Broadcast news/public service
- 13.30 The future of audio
- 14.00 The future of ads
- 14.30 Citizen journalism & crowdsourcing news

Tuesday Oct 22:
- 09.00 Individualized news
- 11.30 Manipulation and bias online and offline
- 12.00 Interactive visualization of news
- 15.00 Death of reading
- 15.30 News aggregators
- 16.00 The second screen

Lecture 20 - Fri Oct 18 (13-15) - Swartling

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Time and place: Friday Oct 18, 13-15 in lecture hall D2.

Title: "Project TEAM work"

Guest: Anna Swartling, Usability architect at Scania CV AB

Talk: Successful project depend on a well functioning project team. But what does that mean in practice? At this lecture, we will examine and discuss these issues together. We will primarily focus on team work, leadership issues, communication and conflict management.

Comment (from Daniel): This is a lecture that has nothing to do with news, but all the more to do with creating successful project groups (and thereby successful projects) during the project phase. This is a lecture where everyone should listen up and pay close attention to what Anna says. You fail to do so at your own risk as this might increase the chance that your project group won't pan out the way you want - and with detrimental effects on your satisfaction about your project, about the course, and perhaps also about your grade. Do remember that everyone in a project groups gets the same grade - so being able to "debug" any problems in the project group can be vital both to your wellbeing and to your resulting grade from the course. Furthermore do note that KTH uses the whole spectrum of the available grade scale - you are in no way "guaranteed" to receive A's or B's or indeed even C's or D's just because you manage to hand in something (rather than nothing) at the end of the term.

About: Anna Swartling is currently working at Scania, one of the premier truck and bus companies in the world. She has a Ph.D. in Human-Computer Interaction from KTH. She has long experience of team work and leadership from a variety of different positions and businesses, including KTH school projects, team manager, project manager for computer systems development projects as well as being an actor and a director in theater productions, chairman of several boards and research projects.

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Literature: Read Scott Kim's text "Interdisciplinary cooperation" which is accessible in Bilda (Administrative/Literature/131018 Kim.pdf). Although the text specifically treats the difficulties of computer scientists cooperating with graphic designers, the lessons are applicable far beyond this specific case.

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Lecture 19 - Thu Oct 17 (15-17) - Hossainzadeh

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Time and place: Thursday October 17 at 15-17 in lecture hall D3.

Title: "Exception = Exceptional - alternative futures through big picture thinking in a creative process"

Guest lecturer: Milad Hossainzadeh, Ba(h) Dip.M.Arch

Talk: What happens to an idea when approached from different angles and different cultural views? Is there a limit on how radical an idea can be? What then are the social, cultural, behavioral, economical, political, technical and ecological consequences?

This lecture will explore how lateral and root-thinking can highlight an exception and expand our perception of what is possible to bring onboard into a concept. In order to push forward, we will expose the consequences of the exception and create temporary realities where we allow for a critical discussion to take place. The lecture aims to involve debate and discussion as well as spontaneous questions, so feel free to jump in...

About: Milad Hossainzadeh is a young architect and entrepreneur who was born in Iran. He grew up in Sweden and partly in London where he received his Masters from UCL The Bartlett School of Architecture. He is currently based in Stockholm, working at the leading Scandinavian architectural firm White. He shares his time as a member of Urban Land Institute and working strategically with international relations within the field s architecture, urban design, business development and start-ups. As an architect, he has an interest in optimizing the power of cultural innovation and systematic root thinking.

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Lecture 18 - Mon Oct 14 (10-12) - Picha Edwardsson

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Time & Place: Monday October 14 at 10-12 in lecture hall D2.

Guest lecturer: Malin Picha Edwardsson, PhD student in Media technology.

Title: Carbon footprint of News Publishing

Talk: This talk summarizes the most important trends within the media development and discusses what environmental impact different media channels have today. Important questions regarding the future of media will also be raised, such as What will be the environmental impact of emerging media channels? And is it possible to create a sustainable media sector in the future?

About: Malin Picha Edwardsson has a licentiate degree in Media technology from KTH, and has previously worked in the media industry both as an editor and as a project manager with questions related to digital development and emerging media. She is currently working on her PhD with focus on scenarios of the future of news and environmental aspects of emerging media consumption trends.

 

Literature (attached): 

- Picha Edwardsson (ed) (2012), "Carbon footprint of news publishing", Wan-ifra research report: Shaping the future of news publishing. Available in Bilda.

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Shortlist for project topics!

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Below are the topics you can choose to form project groups around. There are 20 topics in the list below and 47 students taking the course (excluding the executive group). I expect 10 or 11 groups to come out of this process (with 4 or 5 members in each group). Go here to specify what your 1st, 2nd and 3rd hand choice for project topics is!

DO NOTE: The deadline for specifying your preferences is Thursday night. I will work on putting the project groups together on Friday and you will get to know the results at seminar 4 (Monday Oct 14 after lunch). If you do not specify you preference, I will assume that you are equally interested in all topics and you might end up wherever!

DO NOTE: It is possible to form two project groups around the same topic if there is overwhelming interest in a specific topic. These two groups would initially have to work together to carve out two different and separate directions in which to take your respective projects. It's ok to overlap - but not too much!

I wrote a relatively long blog post about the Future of Media group formation process on my personal academic blog last year; "How should student project groups be put together?". Scroll to the last part of the blog post if you just want the basic facts. Read the whole text if you also want to know the reasons for not allowing students to freely choose who to work with. By all means also have a look at a second blog post I wrote last year about students' ambition, grades and the work load in the course; "Student project groups - ambitions and grades". 

Do also note that the topics below are only to be seen as starting points - the project groups can develop, change and bend the descriptions below in any direction you think is interesting as well as pick up aspects of topics that were left behind during the two brainstorming seminars.

/Daniel

1. Citizen journalism & crowdsourcing news

What is the future of citizen journalism? How could we all make it work? What would the advantages/disadvantages/implications be?

2. Individualized news

We will have 100% customized and individualized news in the future! How will this come about? What will the implications be (for technology, for behavior, for society, for democracy)?

3. Interactive visualization of news

Mash-ups of news events, maps, comments, discussions and video - what will the “whole package” look like in the future?

4. The medium is the message

How does the news medium shape the news? How does technology reshape that reshaping? What news “fit” newspapers, radio, TV and evolving digital channels? (example: an event is not “good news” on TV unless there are moving images capturing the event.)

5. News and background knowledge

How can the most recent events be combined with the offer to know more about the background of a news event? How can the very latest events (news) be combined with deep knowledge of underlying forces (history) through new technologies?

6. The future of censorship

Many countries suffer from censorship. Will recent and future technological developments help or undermine censorship? China, but also the US (Manning, Snowdon) comes to mind as well as Wikileaks etc.

7. The future of digital paper

Is there a future in-between paper and screens? What does that future look like?

8. News habits of the future

Examine present (“advanced”?) news habits (perhaps of a specialized group) and extrapolate to the future. What at the news habits of the future? How do new technologies enable new behaviors and habits?

9. News aggregators

Are news aggregators, rather than publishing houses the future of news? Will Google, Buzzfeed and Reddit choose news for you rather than DN, Aftonbladet and SvD?

10. Manipulation and bias online and offline

It can be argued that beyond pure censorship, media (newspaper, radio, tv) always “manipulate” the news in different ways when choosing, preparing and producing them. This can perhaps be avoided on the internet by combining multiple sources about the same event. Or do new technologies allow for ever-more-devious manipulation and bias online than what was ever possible offline? But filtering can on the other hand also be seen as a service (performed by software or an experienced editor). See further the concept of “filter bubbles”.

11. News-by-algorithms
Will algorithms replace editors? Can algorithms (perfectly?) match your personal preferences with news content? What would the implications for news be if Amazon produced your newspaper (“people who read… also read…”)? Nicklas Lundblad mentioned “Knowledge taste networks”. What are they? How will they work?

12. Filter bubbles and serendipity engines
Information overload (a bad signal-to-noise ratio) -> filtering -> bias, “filter bubbles” -> serendipity engines. Is this a picture of the future? Is something missing? Are the implications for the most part positive or negative? What will come next? What are the implications for news (and for democracy, for media’s “watchdog” function etc.)?

13. Räntekartan+
Ola and Olle from SvD talked about databases + powerful journalism + political power/reach (“data journalism” is the name of an ongoing research project at Södertörn University). Räntekartan (“The interest rate map”) was inexpensive to set up and had many beneficial effects for SvD. So, what comes after Räntekartan, Hyreskollen etc.? What’s the next project? Envision it and make it come true (conceptually)! Will “data journalism” be followed by “big data journalism”?

14. News and geography
Kristiansen/Schibsted preached that geography matters online in a variety of ways. Blocket is local, you buy stuff locally so advertising is always local too. What is the future of nearness and geography in an Internet-world without borders? What news are global, what news will be local and what does the interface between them look like? What is the role of geography of the future of news?

15. The future of ads
Kristiansen/Schibsted talked about intermediaries and the increasingly complex ways that publishing houses, media agencies and advertisers “meet” today. What is the future of ads (in a post-cookie world?)? Will ads be voluntary and what would the implications then be for newspapers and/or news?

16. The second screen
Kristiansen/Schibsted talked about the second screen, the screen you have on the side when most of your attention is focused on the first screen (the TV for instance). What is the future of the second screen in the future of news? 

17. Death of reading
Aftonbladet does a lot of TV production online nowadays. Is this part of a trend where text is substituted by graphics, images, audio and video? What will news look like after we stop reading them? What happens to concentration, patience and reflection as well as ability to accept and think about new ideas and impressions? How will it affect the quality of news? What is the connection between reading and (quality) news?

18. The future of broadcast news/The future of public service
What is the future of broadcast news? How will TV and/or radio news evolve in the future? Will everything migrate online or will we still have analog broadcast? How will broadcast news adapt and what will it look like? This topic could also be connected to the future of public service (e.g. for example Swedish Radio, Swedish Television, BBC, National Public Radio etc.). 

19. The future of audio
A lot of emphasis is placed on text on paper or screens or on moving images, but what about pure audio in the form of radio or podcasts? What is the future of the human voice and intimate storytelling that is delivered right into your ears (perhaps while you jog, or do the dishes, or take the bus)? Does radio/audio have a "news future" and if so, what does it look like?

20. Smart home news network
With AI in the home, news selection and consumption could be customized. Develop a vision and a scenario for the Smart home news network (or something). How could The Future of News be married to AI in the home environment, what would the outcome be?