Interactive Newsprint appears at III ICMC Conference, Porto

May saw the Interactive Newsprint team, well one of the team – John – travel to Porto to present at the third International Media and Communications (ICMC) conference.

Delivered at the welcoming University of Porto, the paper provided an overview of the project today, we asked the central question for the whole project: can printed electronics save the newspaper industry?

It’s too early to say for certain, but the project is moving beyond our early fact-finding workshops that took place in the autumn of 2011 and late winter of this year and the conference provided the chance to share our progress.The conference itself focussed on new journalistic business ecosystems, practices and processes, as well as coverage of key events using traditional and social media. (For a full running order, click here.)

During the presentation, we charted the project’s inception, following the conclusion of the EPSRC-funded Bespoke Project, the creation of our initial demonstrators and workshops, and the preparation for a summer of content generation and platform development. We also showed our ‘Preston News’ demonstrator – which presented embedded audio content within a traditional paper format.

Developing methodology

Over the last few months, Interactive Newsprint has begun to bed-down its working methodology – both within an interdisciplinary team working on innovative technologies and within communities throughout Preston.

We’re now at a point of working with ‘community editors’ who will collaborate with our journalists and designers to generate interactive paper platforms that are tailored to their own needs and requirements.Exciting!

We’ll continue to update on progress over the summer months as our new prototypes emerge.