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Welcome To Hofstra Journalism 80's Nassau News Wiki.

Hyperlocal Nassau News: Professor Krochmal's Page

Journalism 80 Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Hyperlocal Nassau News A project by the Hofstra University online journalism class of Professor Mo Krochmal.

This project represents the work of college seniors in the school of communication at Hofstra University. The students are enrolled in one-semester, three-credit class with the goal of teaching a small group of students -- seniors and juniors and one lucky sophomore -- how to cover a community at a very local level, using the multimedia tools of the Internet.

The first stage of the project is to use wiki software to create a knowledge base of the stories they are going to cover. The project is slated for completion in six weeks, at the end of the semester.

This portion of the project -- the wiki -- is set for a Sunday night deadline, this Sunday, at 10 a.m.

The student editor selected for this project is Garrett Frey, who first broached the subject of wikis in an e-mail to the professor. His interest sparked this wiki project. The students have selected preliminary beats and will create wiki pages to serve as a knowledge base for the articles they write and produce.

The student reporters will find statistics, data, information to create what I will call a online backgrounder for their work. This will be referenced as they create their on work, and will be open to the world to edit.

We hope that the stories we tell will focus on specific areas of reporting that are not usually covered by mainstream media, stories that reflect portions of the community where cultures overlap and that the individuals the student reporters cover will add their knowledge to this online repository. Go to http://editthis.info/journalism80/ClassPages to view a list of the student's 'beat wikis.'

We are leveraging the wiki software but are adapting it to our own uses, so this might not exactly parallel the wiki structure that the digirati are used to seeing, but we believe that innovation comes from a willingness to take risks and diverge from the pack. Indulge us as we explore this form and see what we learn.

To see other projects that the students have accomplished so far, please view http://hofstrajournalism80.blogspot.com, a student-edited news blog.