Meet Annie, Annenberg Media’s student-developed news app. A student pitched the project in a journalism product development class I taught in the spring of 2017. The app’s mission, aside from delivering the news to the USC community, is inclusiveness, both within the newsroom and beyond. With that in mind, Annie’s main component is a chat feature in which the character Annie delivers news in a friendly, easy to digest format. Users can also chat back with her.
The app development process had been led by me and my colleague Jenn de la Fuente, but it was conceived, designed and developed by students. You can read more about the process here, here and here.