Story Grove

The Reynolds Journalism Institute holds an annual competition every year for journalism and computer science students to come together and create something. Some years have a theme or a client, others are more open-ended. As a freshman, I wanted to get involved right away. I recruited a team of other interested students, all of whom were seniors or master's students, worked with them to generate a concept and then wrote a proposal for Story Grove. I became the team's creative producer and led our group after we were selected as finalists.  

So what did Story Grove do? It was an app that would use the Public Media Platform (the competition's client) to create a collective news experience where users could create and cultivate “trees” of custom news content to follow stories on a specific topic or centered around an idea. The "trees" in Story Grove served as a place users could easily store news content and then access it later. Every story “seeded” onto a tree in turn built Story Grove’s "root system" of tags and search terms to help, essentially, organize the Public Media Platform. 

You can watch the condensed version of one of our pitches here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qu6mVX8yAFI.