NewsPad: Designing for Collaborative Storytelling in Neighborhoods

TL;DR

NewsPad is a collaborative content editor designed to enhance neighborhood storytelling by enabling real-time collaboration, contributor recruitment, and structured story creation, demonstrated through successful pilot deployments.

Contribution

The paper introduces NewsPad, a novel tool that facilitates collaborative storytelling in local communities, addressing limitations of traditional blogs and social media.

Findings

NewsPad elicits collaborative story creation in pilot deployments.

Users successfully recruited contributors and structured stories effectively.

The tool improved the readability and context of neighborhood news.

Abstract

This paper introduces design explorations in neighborhood collaborative storytelling. We focus on blogs and citizen journalism, which have been celebrated as a means to meet the reporting needs of small local communities. These bloggers have limited capacity and social media feeds seldom have the context or readability of news stories. We present NewsPad, a content editor that helps communities create structured stories, collaborate in real time, recruit contributors, and syndicate the editing process. We evaluate NewsPad in four pilot deployments and find that the design elicits collaborative story creation.