The Association for Independent Radio (AIR) needed a digital platform that could dynamically showcase the evolution of 15 unique, public media incubations across the country. Localore: Finding America empowered producers to invent new storytelling models with citizens in order to bring to life the rich diversity of America today.
I worked alongside Dan Kass and Alexei Miagkov to design and architect a site that could ingest real-time social media from many platforms, create a cohesive view of individual productions and provide the organization the ability to curate work from many producers into comprehensive themes.
From Anchorage to Philadelphia, all of the producers had distinct settings and people to introduce to a national audience. Our homepage design sought to draw users into each community through full bleed immersive video.
Having helped with the first round of Localore, I knew the timelines for each producer would be highly variable due to their schedules, goals and ability to embed themselves. We designed around this range of output by creating a beautiful yet flexible production page layout. For each production, we were able to establish a minimum amount of information and media that would then grow over time as each producer launched stories from their community.
Additionally, we wanted to expose the real time narratives and community participation via social media posts. To do this for over 50 social media feeds, we opted to incorporate an instance of Juicer - a social media aggregation tool. By customizing Juicer, we were able to show a comprehensive view of all participation as well as showcase each production's individual feed.
AIR's approach to working with local public media has proven them as a leader in community-based journalism. With this in mind, we advocated for creating an open source project to post on github that could contribute an adaptable framework to the community news world.
Juicer feed pulling social media posts from 15 different, national productions across twitter, instagram and facebook.
UX & Visual Design: Lindsey Wagner
Project Management: Lindsey Wagner
Front End: Dan Kass
Backend Dev: Alexei Miagkov
Front End: Dan Kass
Backend Dev: Alexei Miagkov
