Shooting out of the collaborative minds of various students, faculty and staff at RIT, Innovation News set out to create an on demand, scalable, cross medium newspaper that displays the news as fast as it is created, “It was made possible by the collaboration of experts across a broad range of disciplines: from computer science to systems engineering, to visual and verbal story-telling, and demonstrates RIT’s leadership in enabling these kinds of collaborative efforts to solve the complex problems of the future,” Frank Cost, associate dean of the RIT College of Imaging Arts and Sciences. The entire project was developed in response to the call for innovations for the Imagine RIT Festival.

In a joint effort with RIT’s Open Publishing Lab, a cross-disciplinary center that focuses on researching new methods of content creation and developing innovative applications to publish across various media, the Innovation News brought together 25 student photographers and 12 student writers. These students sent content through Drupal, an open source application created for news content management. The content was sent through a custom made XML import feed that connected Drupal to an InDesign layout. With the help of RIT’s Print Application Lab, Digital Publishing Center, and HUB, using Cannon ImagePRESS C1, Xerox DocuColor 6060, Xerox iGen3110, Kodak NexPress 2100, and HP Indigo 5000 printers the newspaper was created in print-ready-form, free of charge, and actively distributed through the Imagine RIT Festival. Printing four editions in total, the Innovation News was able, through the quick response of festival attendance, to scale the amount of newspapers being printed to correlate production with circulation.

The photographers in the field were given wireless cameras, generously provided by Nikon, to capture activates occurring in the Imagine RIT Festival. Located in the action was photo faculty member Doug Rea who managed the photos students working with the project; while in the pressroom Gunter Cartwright, Associate Professor of Photography, and Pulitzer Prize Winner William Snyder of the Dallas Morning News ran 350 images through imaging workflow to make them print and web accessible.

Circulating through the Imagine RIT festival, student journalists reported on activities occurring throughout the day. The students submitted their findings through RIT’s wireless network on personal laptops through a Drupal created account. One student even managed to successfully submit two stories via an Apple iPhone to contribute to the spirit of the innovation of the festival and give expandability of technology to the Innovation News project spectrum. Overseeing newspaper project as Editor-in-Chief, Assistant Professor of color imaging and publishing, Michael Riordan along with the help of Myrtle Jones and Christine Adamo edited incoming articles and prepared them to be distributed to web and print based production.

On the Innovation News website, the team created PDF copies of each printed edition and made it accessible to the public masses. Attached to the upper right corner of each printed edition, the Innovation News created a QR code that when scanned by a user’s cell phone would direct them to the Innovation News website, giving access to all reported stories. In keeping with the spirit of innovation presented at the Imagine RIT festival, the Innovation News, in alliance with the CollaboRITorium, created a GoogleEarth connection where individuals could locate direct story activities as they were being reported on with a virtual 3D map of RIT’s campus. To date this application has only been successfully applied by one other newspaper, the New York Times.

Upon completion, the Innovation News was found to be a remarkable success and RIT hopes to further extend its capabilities for future endeavors.

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