An Incubator for Media Innovation

When designing digital storytelling tools, Joe Germuska doesn’t like trading what’s exciting for what’s doable. As “chief nerd” at Northwestern’s Knight Lab, Executive Director Germuska encourages students to think far beyond what’s currently available, to what their journalist clients may not even know is possible.

“To some extent it’s our obligation at a university to not always draw that line,” he says. “We have to find room for the big experimental ideas while also attending to the fact that journalists have real problems today and can’t necessarily wait around for something to come to fruition.”

A joint initiative of Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications and the Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, the Knight Lab brings journalists and computer scientists together to accelerate media innovation by creating new digital tools, building partnerships with media organizations, and expanding the media innovation community.

Launched in 2011 with support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Knight Lab is a nationally-recognized media innovation incubator that has developed many open-source, adaptable tools for media makers. The most famous, TimelineJS, originally built by associate professor Zach Wise (formerly of The New York Times Multimedia Team), allows users to tell a story by creating a beautiful interactive timeline. It has been used by more than 250,000 people and some major media outlets, including TIME, Le Monde, and the Vancouver Sun. The Denver Post used it in a package that covered the Aurora theater shooting — the package would later win a Pulitzer — and La Nación used it to cover the ascension of Pope Francis by making a timeline of all the popes.

Another example is SoundCite, a tool that enables you to add inline audio to a text story. Created by Tyler Fisher Medill ’14 during his junior year at Northwestern, the tool has been used by newsrooms around the country including the Washington Post, Texas Tribune, and Education Week.

Fisher went on to work as a news app developer at NPR and is now the senior news app developer at Politico. Other Knight Lab students have gone on to work at the New York Times, Vox Media, NPR, Medium, FiveThirtyEight, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Huffington Post, and more.

“It’s never been more important for the journalism and media industry to adapt to the 24/7, on-demand news world that we live in,” says Germuska. “The Knight Lab challenges students to get ahead of the curve, and create products that will change the way people around the world create and consume media.”