War News Radio


Sponsor: Amy DiPierro
Email: adipier1 [at] gmail.com

What's the mission of your project or organization?

War News Radio is an independent and award-winning journalism project at Swarthmore College devoted to putting a human face on the long-term causes and consequences of conflict. Our mission is to bring voices otherwise absent from the media - civilians in combat zones, war veterans, survivors of violence, and solution-oriented experts - to our audience and the world.

What challenges or problems do you think a mobile app could solve for your project or organization?

I can think of two principal problems a mobile app could solve - and I'm sure there are more. The first problem has to do with gathering content. We need a means to receive high-quality audio, video, and images from far away sources who might not have access to a computer. Often, we record phone interviews, but the sound quality on these recordings can be poor. Recently, we have encouraged sources to call us on a land line and simultaneously record themselves on a smart phone, but this process is very unwieldy. For one thing, it can be confusing for sources to figure out how to record audio, and because interviews may be as long as an hour, the files they record are often too long for them to send to us via email. An app that could record higher quality audio than a phone line and automatically send it to us would allow us to have audio we can use from a wider range of far-flung source. This same feature, I imagine, could also help us to tap content from breaking news from reporters in the field, whether they be students studying abroad or on assignment in Philadelphia, as well as from independent radio producers and citizen journalists all over the world. The second problem has to do with distributing content. Because we primarily work with audio, it can be a challenge to listen to our work on a mobile platform. As a listener myself, I consume a lot of podcasts and streams using existing apps on my iPhone, and though most of these audio-specific apps are fairly dependable, links to audio on Twitter and Facebook (the sources of most of our listens) are not. If we had an app in which users could link their account in the app to their social media accounts, so that clicking on a WNR audio link would automatically redirect them to the more dependable player on our app, that would be very helpful. Also, after they've listened to our work, the ability to easily share it/comment on it with their social media followers would also be very valuable.

Please share any other questions or concerns:

I know I've articulated two very specific problems above, but the thing that excites me about having a Swarthmore class work on an app for WNR is the problems you'll see that I've missed - and the solutions we can find together. Perhaps a mobile app could make it easier to browse old WNR archives. Perhaps it could automatically notify users about new content. Perhaps it could stream live audio/video. Perhaps I'm dreaming too small, and there's something more innovative we can do to transform our audience into collaborators.