Planet Princeton chosen for NJ newsroom mobile app project

Planet Princeton is one of five local newsrooms in New Jersey that will receive a free mobile app in the coming weeks. The Center for Cooperative Media is teaming up with Push App to bring mobile apps to the local newsrooms as part of the ongoing NJ Mobile News Lab project that aims to support mobile innovation in local news.

Push App is already being used by several publications in Europe, including the consortium of 24 non-profit investigative outlets. Push is a mobile app for news outlets that don’t have the time, money or resources to build their own custom code base. Push allows users to read stories, watch videos, share to social media, and search archived articles. It also lets readers access content on the go, even when they don’t have access to the Internet. The app also offers a push notification function that allows publishers to deliver alerts and stories directly to readers’ mobile devices in real time.

Data from each of the publishers that receive a customized version of Push will be collected and delivered to a research partner at Rutgers University for analysis and eventual publication in a forthcoming study on the use of mobile technology in local newsrooms.

Planet Princeton is excited to be a part of this pilot project in New Jersey. We hope the feedback and lessons learned during the project will be of use to other local news publishers. We are excited that we will finally be able to offer our readers a long-awaited app. We attempted creating an app several times over the last few years but the technology available to us was way too expensive, time-consuming to build and maintain, and often clunky in terms of the user experience.

We are looking forward to an app that will deliver news, events, and local business information and deals to our readers as well as breaking news alerts about road closures, train delays and other time-sensitive information. We look forward to engaging with readers and receiving feedback that will help the project developers enhance the app and strengthen local journalism in the Garden State.

If you have suggestions or ideas for the app, please send an email to editor @ planetprinceton.com. Thank you.

Avatar of Krystal Knapp

Krystal Knapp is the founding editor of Planet Princeton. Follow her on Twitter @krystalknapp. She can be reached via email at editor AT planetprinceton.com. Send all letters to the editor and press releases to that email address.

6 Comments

  1. Will the app come with the usual obnoxious and wholly unmoderated comments from charter school freeloaders, or will those be available only as a separate in-app purchase?

    1. Delete—- On Sun, 16 Apr 2017 11:27:16 -0400 Disqus wrote —- “Will the app come with the usual obnoxious and wholly unmoderated comments from charter school freeloaders, or will those be available only as a separate in-app purchase?”  Settings   A new comment was posted on Planet Princeton Steve (Guest): Will the app come with the usual obnoxious and wholly unmoderated comments from charter school freeloaders, or will those be available only as a separate in-app purchase? 11:27 a.m., Sunday April 16 | Other comments by Steve     Reply           Moderate this comment by email Email address: steve123@hotmail.com | IP address: 38.95.109.124 Reply to this email with “Delete”, “Approve”, or “Spam”, or moderate from the Disqus moderation panel.       You’re receiving this message because you’re signed up to receive notifications about activity on threads authored by krystalknapp. You can unsubscribe from emails about activity on threads authored by krystalknapp by replying to this email with “unsubscribe” or reduce the rate with which these emails are sent by adjusting your notification settings.

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