411PUBLISH: ASU journalism school develops iPhone app for 'Arizona Guardian'

Sunday, June 6, 2010

ASU journalism school develops iPhone app for 'Arizona Guardian' - Phoenix Business Journal

by Mike Sunnucks Phoenix Business Journal June 4, 2010

Arizona State University and the Arizona Guardian news organization have developed an iPhone application that allows mobile users to identify a region’s elected officials based on the global positioning systems in their smart phones.

The free Arizona Political Directory application lets users search for their federal, state and county representatives. No matter where a user is in the state, the app will identify which elected officials represent that area. The app is searchable by office, district or name, and it provides links to the officials’ websites, short biographies and contact information.

ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication’s New Media Innovation Lab and the Guardian news website developed the application, which also allows for database searches of Arizona’s elected officials. They are developing the same app for Motorola’s Droid phone.

“Our hope is that voters will use the app to become more engaged more often with their elected officials,” said Guardian Publisher Bob Grossfeld. “We all felt very strongly that we would make the application available for free as a way of saying ‘thank you’ to everyone who has supported the Arizona Guardian over the past 18 months.”

Grossfeld did not say how much the Guardian paid ASU for the work.

“We hired them to do the programming as a way of supporting what the Cronkite School is doing in the area of training young people for the kind of online journalism work that we do,” he said.

The application was developed by ASU graduate students Cody Shotwell and Elizabeth Hill at the New Media Innovation Lab. The student-staffed lab has been working on research and product development since it was established in 2006.

“Today, we can deliver relevant information to people when they need it — when they are engaged in an issue and want to immediately call, tweet or e-mail a representative — and where they need it based on the geographic location of the user,” lab director Retha Hill said in a prepared statement.

Hill previously was a vice president of Black Entertainment Television.

The ASU lab also has developed a green game to increase energy awareness and conducted research about how young people use new media for the Newspaper Association of American Foundation and the Gannett Co.

Gannett is the Virginia-based corporate parent of the Arizona Republic newspaper and KPNX-TV Channel 12.

The Guardian was established in January 2009 by former news staffers from the East Valley Tribune. The online news group focuses on the Arizona Legislature and politics in general. It competes with the Arizona Capitol Times.