Future of Cross-Cultural Storytelling

• What we have done. Since the previous report, we did a lot of literature and web research to find out about cultural differences in user interfaces and the different meanings of symbols/icons/colours/images in the various cultures. Our main results are that there are a lot of differences in the UI and in the meaning of the symbols. We have not discussed it further yet, but there is the possibility now to design the user interface in a globalized, internationalized or in a local way. Furthermore, we looked up, how news will be consumed in the future and how stories are told in different ways, which guided us to the result that wearable are the future of news consumption. Therefore, we decided that our system will be used in combination with a wearable, where the user receives the headlines and depending on the screen size of the wearable a short abstract of the article as well. Whereas, the main use should take place on a medium or large screen. Additionally, in our use case, there should be the possibility of sending the service from the wearable to the larger screen via a wireless connection. 
  During the week, we had one meeting, where we summarized our findings of the literature and web research and discussed, what exactly our system should be, the main functions and features of the system and the business plan and started to talk about our corporate identity.

• What we will do. What you will do next (next step(s) in your project. After an extensive discussion about our service’s definition and features the next step would be to discuss our concept from a realistic point of view. Some of us have taken the course Media Management and have therefore the “business model”-thinking in mind. That is something that we started to discuss of the end of this week, and already encountered several challenges, therefore that will be one of the priorities for next week. One of the challenges is how and why different newspapers would agree to be featured on our website. What will be our value proposition to them? As a lot of their revenue comes from advertising, when we argue that the value of our service for our readers will be that they find all news in one place, it must mean that the brands lose customers and revenue as they lose the ability to show display ads on their original platforms. If we would pay news magazines to be featured on our platform, what will our revenue come from? Also, we believe that unbiased and accessible news should be available to everyone, and therefore we don’t see it legitimate to charge users for the service. Those are the questions we are discussing at this point.
• Challenges encountered. The communication within the group is one of the hardest matters for the moment. Even if we have meetings and do great progress we have troubles to share the same point of view and agree on the importance of certain activities that we should focus on. You could say that we are in the “storming phase” again, so now we look forward into entering the performing phase next week!Some of the group members think it’s more important to focus on different features and exact technical functions while other think it’s of higher importance to talk about the value proposition of the service and how it will work and be used before we set every technical detail. We all are agreeing on the importance of working through both aspects but we have hard to communicate. This leads to large challenges in the working process and it slow down the process a bit because of the reason that it’s harder to divide tasks among the group members since everyone is not aligned in their perception of the concept. 
  It’s also a challenge to actually put ourselves into the ears or eyes of the future audience and try to figure out if our idea make sense or not and if it’s understandable. All through the project the importance of including the main topic; the cross-cultural storytelling aspect should be considered and also taken into account in the changes and development that have been done. Last we find it difficult to know where the gaps are within the concept and which part we should focus on to achieve the requirements of the course as well.

• Changes in the project. As mentioned earlier, we have specified that we are to offer a service and not a product per se. This because we don’t want our users to buy an artifact in order to use our news gathering platform, as well as we believe a service as a seamless solution that you can use on different connected devices will bring value to the user. We added e.g. social sharing and commenting to the service in order for the users to communicate since we have seen an increase in interest for user generated content and co-creation. Although while still being a multi-subjective service, a commenting and sharing function can make for the user to feel involved and increase their interest in the service. We also changed some of the functions, as well as came up with new ones (also as mentioned in What we have done). So this might not be a “change”, but more a progress in the service development. We are also in the middle of the name-changing process (from CCN - Cross Cultural News, a twist of CNN “ha-ha”) to something we all like, since CCN was something we just invented as a last minute solution before the 50-words-hand-in. However, we haven’t decided on it quite yet, so it will be a “to-be-continued” for next weeks blog post. *drum roll*
• Resources. Because of the large amount of literature and web research done, we have found many useful resources, e.g. from the databases ACM and SpringerLink. The scientific papers, we have found on this databases, are all about cultural differences in user interfaces and about cross-cultural communication. A very recommendable and useful source was for example this book (http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-642-39143-9), which contains of several articles. Furthermore, we have found a useful article (http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfmid=1502658&dl=ACM&coll=DL&CFID=562248448&CFTOKEN=53891227), which describes a similar idea to ours. Therefore, we have seen that gathering articles from different news sources, presenting them in a timeline and extracting the main information is already possible. We have also looked into different media and news predictions so to say regarding how news will be consumed in the future. (http://www.medieutredningen.se/om-oss/ ) (http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/brand-connect/wp/enterprise/are-wearables-the-future-of-news/ )(https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/Reuters%20Institute%20Digital%20News%20Report%202014.pdf)