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Creative Connect

Katiana Hoefle
reimaginingjournalism

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Fake news is more provoking, so how do we make reputable news more likely to be spread?

“Fake news evokes much more emotion than the average tweet… Fake tweets tended to elicit words associated with surprise and disgust, while accurate tweets summoned words associated with sadness and trust, they found.”

-The Atlantic

The Problem

As we’ve discussed all throughout this class, fake news contributes to a distrust in the media. This is harmful to journalists who increasingly have a harder time doing their job as they are demonized, as well as harmful for the public who can’t stay properly informed. While fake news is destructive, we’ve seen that is incredibly successful in spreading. If we can harness the qualities that make fake news stories provocative, we can fight back against the wide reach of false news stories and in turn, begin to repair the distrust.

We want to cause an emotional response while maintaining objectivity

Creative Connect

Mission Statement: Creative Connect works to foster a collaborative space between journalists and creative writers as well as the public to produce stories that develop emotional resonance with readers while still maintaining objectivity and journalistic integrity. This platform is easily accessible to anyone with a smartphone or computer, allowing ideas to flow freely through all demographics of society. The simplified graphics create a clear flow within the system allowing reputable news source spread faster and further.

Audience: Anyone looking for news who hasn’t felt connected by the way they interact with news currently. The readers will be people who want to be informed but haven’t felt personally invested. The writers will be journalists who feel that their stories aren’t reaching far enough and creative writers looking for freelance collaborative jobs. Users need to have either a smartphone or computer.

Impact: Bring people who are unconnected to the news to interact with it more. Emotional resonance created by the creative writers will make it more likely to be spread and allow a larger audience to be informed.

Statement of Change: The creation of this app will help emotionally connect every day citizens in the country with their news outlets, and more importantly, their news. Early on in our semester, we discussed Reclaiming Conversation, and how generations are becoming less empathetic. Creative Connect is built with the idea of eliciting emotion among readers and creating empathy between the reader and the subject of the stories. By creating this emotional connection, readers will gravitate towards real news similarly to how they originally gravitated towards the spectacle of fake news.

Step 1: This is the homepage of Creative Connect where the audience would either sign in to the website or sign up to create a new account.

Step 2: This is the page when the person creating the account would decide whether or not they wanted to be a viewer, journalist, or a creative writer. In order to be a journalist or creative writer, one must also include a resume that will be looked over by the Creative Connect team.

Step 3: This is the page that the person would see when starting an account to see what kind of news they are interested in. These are some examples of the various types of news they could choose from.

Step 4: The website takes you to the next page which is dedicated to helping you follow various top journalists on the platform.

Step 5: This is what the main page would look like, including tabs at the top that could move you to the home, moments, notifications, and messages pages.

  • Home: This is the page where you can see all of your followed journalists and creative writers works
  • Moments: This is the page where. you can see all of the most popular journalists of the platform and their posts
  • Notifications: This is where you can see the interactions of the audience with your content or shared content. The public interaction works as a rating system by the rating being a form of credibility.

Step 6: This is the messaging platform where journalists and creative writers can connect. They can work on the same document together or the journalist can send the creative writer money for their work.

Step 7: This is an example of the page of articles written by the most popular journalists.

Resources

Outtakes

  1. Impact: An add-on where the audience can click on news articles and be brought to our site for more engaging and emotional background on people/topics
  • Not replacing the facts, just showing why we should care
  • Specific stories of individuals affected by the news topic
  • Uses multimedia such as photos or videos of the individuals

2. TWO-Cents: An all video platform to keep up attention, using interesting narration and attractive images

  • Brings in emotional resonance by impacting the viewer through showing videos. It creates a community between users that believe in the same things.

Authors

Elias Ferguson, Kiernan McCormick, Katiana Hoefle, Kia McKane, and Keelie Verbeek

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Katiana Hoefle
reimaginingjournalism

Written by Katiana Hoefle

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