A Pilot Study on Developing Newsgames in Collaboration between Journalism and Computer Science Students

Abstract

Producing digital and interactive journalistic products offers unique and important new learning opportunities for journalism education. This study analysed the experiences of two pilot courses on so-called ‘newsgames’ in a Finnish university in 2015 and 2017. The data consisted of the newsgames and other materials produced by the students, student feedback concerning the course and observations of teachers throughout the project. Our analysis demonstrates how producing newsgames in the context of higher education may foster project-based learning experiences, something that has been relatively rare in traditional journalism education. Collaboration with media companies also offered valuable feedback for the students throughout the course and provided them with an opportunity to practice selling their expertise. The study highlights how interdisciplinary and project-based cooperation may benefit journalism education.

Newsgames: The Use of Digital Games by Mass-Media Outlets to Convey Journalistic Messages

“…Finally, the last aspect of newsgames as a journalistic practice concerns their development and production. Examples of this are studies that explore newsgames' development in media (Dowling, 2021;Grace, et al, 2016), their use in the context of a jam (Grace, 2018) or as a project-based practice to benefit journalism education (Siitonen et al, 2019). These studies highlight the opportunities and challenges of newsgames development and the need for a multidisciplinary team to succeed.…”

Journalistic innovation: How new formats of digital journalism are perceived in the academic literature

“…Some of these studies have analysed the specific elements and gaming dynamics used by different media, mainly in examining reports focused on sport (González-Díez et al, 2019; Rojas-Torrijos, 2020), political corruption (Gómez and Cabeza, 2016), human rights (Plewe and Fürsich, 2018) and interactive documentaries (Vázquez-Herrero and López-García, 2017). Studies have also been carried out examining the viability of using newsgames in university education and for journalistic training (Siitonen et al, 2019), analysing newsgames in terms of their usability and understanding their ergonomics and parameters, such as pace and strategy, for playing the game (Teixeira et al, 2015) and determining their limitations and potential for gamification (Meier, 2018).…”

Fairness beyond “equal”: The Diversity Searcher as a Tool to Detect and Enhance the Representation of Socio-political Actors in News Media

“…Future work also requires us to implement the tool, so that the tool is not only theoretically relevant but also practically used. As Siitonen et al [33] demonstrate, the interaction between computer science students and journalism students in pedagogical settings can be valuable in thinking out how to use new applications. Eventually our goal is not only to integrate the tool in journalism education, but also to present the tool to journalists who are currently on the job and hence maximise its impact.…”