Play the game, get the news.

The last decade has radically reshaped news consumption habits. Most people no longer wake up to a newspaper, listen to local news radio on their way to and from work or settle down to watch the evening news before bed. Journalists and journalism are as important as ever, but a new generation of digital natives came of age without traditional media literacy—reading newspapers, listening to news radio or watching television news.

Within the last decade, the number of people who get their news from the Internet has quadrupled. But the change of news habits seems to have accompanied a decline in media literacy—the ability to apply critical reasoning to the assessment of news reporting. And the lost lifelong news habits are crucial to a functioning democracy.

Headliner is a news literacy app that addresses these changing patterns of news consumption by encouraging media literacy of Internet users through an engaging, competitive environment. It records users’ news media activities (such as the type of news media they engage with, the amount of time they spend viewing or listening to news media and how participatory they are in analysis and feedback) and ranks them within their social networks, providing users with the opportunity to receive badges and “duel” with friends as an incentive to view and participate in the news of the day, improving their media literacy.

About Medill

The Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University is a leader in education since 1921, offers programs in journalism and integrated marketing communications that combine enduring skills and values with new techniques and knowledge that are essential to thrive in today’s digital world. Medill has a long-standing reputation for academic excellence, and as the media industry experiences unprecedented change, Medill leads the way in training a new generation of multimedia journalists and integrated marketing communications professionals who are not only thriving in this new media landscape, but are also helping to shape it.

Jeremy Gilbert is an assistant professor teaching media product design. He uses a human centered design process in addition to usability techniques to create innovative media products or improve existing ones, such as tablet/smartphone apps, web-based tools and other news media.

Impact

Headliner’s beta test will begin in September 2013.

Headliner will impact the students’ media literacy in multiple ways:

• Students will be made more conscious of their existing news consumption habits.
• They will be guided to exploring new sources and topics by seeing what their peers are reading, watching or listening to and through a gamification layer that will reward participants with badges based on the news sources, topics and volume of their check-ins.
• The class is divided into discussion sections of 12-18 students. Medill faculty members leading each section will be able to use Headliner’s group functionality to share stories or track students reading habits.

The code created for Headliner will be distributed as open source software on GitHub (an open-source repository) for other users to employ, improve or make their own. Eventually, probably post-beta, group leaders will be able to create their own badges to help their group improvements specific aspects of their media literacy.

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