Zeega rethinks multimedia journalism

"Starbucks has convinced us that we should pay for overpriced coffee, so why can’t we do something similar with journalism?" This question came from a participant at a recent Nieman Foundation for Journalism event entitled “Talk Disruption in Journalism” that featured Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen and former Nieman Fellow David Skok.

Questions like these are becoming increasingly common as newspapers and other journalism outlets think about what innovations will keep them relevant in an increasingly digital age. Some of the answers may be coming straight from college campuses.

Jesse Shapins, a media artist and PhD student at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, is the co-founder of Zeega, a free, online platform that seeks to revolutionize Web publishing and deepen the impact of storytelling by incorporating different forms of media.

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“What we were really inspired by is that the Web is in itself an interactive medium,” Shapins said, “and so we asked the question, ‘What if we don’t conform to the assumptions of print journalism?’”

That was the beginning of an 18-month journey for Shapins and his team, who have been working since to invent, develop and test their new platform for storytelling.

Shapins explained that he and teammates, James Burns and Kara Oehler, all have backgrounds working in either storytelling or journalism. They were struck by the fact that so many of their colleagues in the media industry wanted to create exciting multimedia stories, but would have to do a lot of custom coding to make that possible. The way Shapins envisions it, Zeega will give journalists an easy-to-use platform that allows them to share their interactive stories with the world in just a few clicks, drags and drops. In other words, it’s easy to use.

Shapins noted that working on a college campus has unique benefits that have allowed his team to collaborate with many different partners for prototyping, testing and getting feedback on Zeega. He has received support from the metaLAB, the Innovation Lab, and Library Lab at Harvard.

One particularly useful source of feedback came from a group of students who used Zeega in their classroom.

Shapins presented an idea for a class that would combine media practice and ethnographic research that Ernst Karel, a lecturer in anthropology at Harvard and manager of the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab, would go on to co-teach. The semester course, called “Media Archaeology of Place,” used Zeega as a tool for student projects.

“The class for that semester was using Zeega for the first time and was really troubleshooting it,” Karel said. “That was a big step forward for Jesse and his team.”

Sensate, “A Journal for Experiments in Critical Media Practice” that was founded by a Harvard graduate student in the Department of Anthropology, is one example of Zeega’s application in journalism to which Karel pointed.

College newspapers are another media source that could benefit, Sharpins said.

“If you’re working on a college newspaper, you probably have some kind of content management system -- like WordPress -- where the default format is similar to a blog post: text with photos,” Shapins said. “With Zeega you can combine image, text and sound and then put it right back into WordPress or whatever format you are using.”

Although Zeega is unique in its specific goals as an interactive storytelling platform, Shapins pointed to tools such as Storyplanet and a new publishing platform called Medium as other examples of innovative forces within journalism.

“We thought about the question of how we can think about new formats in storytelling online today and how we can create more immersive, exciting story experiences,” he said. “I think it’s a really special time that we have media in all of these different places online, and we wanted to figure out how we could put all of that together.”

Zeega was recently selected to be one of six startups at Matter, a start-up accelerator for media entrepreneurs in San Francisco.

Ishani Premaratne is a Spring 2013 USA TODAY Collegiate Correspondent. Learn more about her here.

This story originally appeared on the USA TODAY College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.