Traditional journalism is dying, wah! We know! So how can we foster new ideas with journalistic, technological and business vision?

Lock up grad students from these fields in a room for 9 days, and see what happens.

That’s where I’ve been with 17 other USC students from journalism, engineering and MBA programs, collaborating on mobile tech for news outlets.

A charming engineering student and two brilliant MBA grads were on my team to develop a new mobile app concept for KCRW. The station told us they wanted new ways to engage listeners, so we proposed a technology that allows users to select and share just a snippet of a program. Courtesy of Ben Moskowitz, we learned this is already being prototyped with Mozilla’s new open-source language, Popcorn.js. Demo audio-snippet sharing here.

And here’s our concept video (turned around in a 48-hr timeframe):

Now that we’ve been released from the 9-day boot camp and are decompressing from the collaborative buzz, I look forward to what develops. Perhaps we’ll continue to engage with KCRW over this concept, and I’m excited to delve into popcorn.js and learn more about the beautiful things they’re making. WordPress says it best… Code is poetry.