In Brief: J-School Collaborative advances to third round in competitive Challenge Fund

By Stacy Lunsford
University News Service
May 8, 2015

A collaborative including Cindy Royal, associate professor of digital media at Texas State University, is among 11 projects from 13 universities across the country winning the second round of the Challenge Fund for Innovation in Journalism Education.

The Challenge Fund encourages journalism programs to experiment with innovative ways of providing news and information. This is the second consecutive year a collaborative entry involving Royal has advanced.

Texas State joined professors from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and USC Annenberg, and journalist professionals to form a Maker curriculum that tracks food truck lines as a method to show news organizations how they can use the Internet of Things to develop commercially valuable data. Essentially, experimenters are building a device that will track the location of food trucks and calculate the line at the eateries.

In addition to Royal, the J-School Collaborative team includes Matt Waite, professor of practice, University of Nebraska-Lincoln; Robert Hernandez, professor of professional practice, University of Southern California; Sarah Baker Hansen, food critic, Omaha World-Herald; Matt Wynn, reporter, Omaha World-Herald; Andrew Chavez, news application specialist, Austin American-Statesman; and Ben Welsh, database producer, Los Angeles Times.

For more information, contact Cindy Royal at cr38@txstate.edu.