Northwestern junior Katherine Zhu recently received a $20,000 scholarship award from Google and the Associated Press for her dedication to and passion for combining technology, new media and journalism.
Zhu, who is in Medill, is one of the first students to receive the new scholarship. Google and the AP also offered $20,000 scholarships to five other college students this year.
As part of the scholarship’s application process, Zhu said, students must send in a proposal for a project that would enhance the media industry through technology. Zhu’s project, LedeHub, will be an online portal where journalists can submit forms of media including photos, text, data sets and graphics. The portal will be an open source of information, Zhu said, which will allow journalists to collaborate to create larger news projects.
Zhu said she modeled her proposal off an existing website called GitHub, which allows computer programmers to share and post code that anyone can access.
Although the world of journalism is often opposed to collaboration because of its competitive nature, Zhu said, more collaboration should exist in the media industry to please information-hungry consumers who no longer get their news from one source.
“I think that this is a change in culture that needs to happen,” Zhu said.
Zhu previously worked for North by Northwestern, interned at the Beijing bureau for ABC News, constructed a mobile site for GOOD magazine and was a finalist for the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership.
Before she came to NU, Zhu said, she had little experience creating online interactive projects. However, after using NBN’s interactive housing guide, she thought it was interesting and soon started working for the media outlet’s interactive section. One of her first experiences was at NBN’s tutorials with the previous interactive editor, Emily Chow (Medill ’12)., who showed the beginners an interactive of a rotating wheel.
“It was literally just three turns and it just like looped over and over and it was not complex at all, but it was the first more interactive thing that I’d ever done, and I thought it was super cool,” Zhu said.
Zhu later decided to double-major in journalism and computer science. Jeremy Gilbert, an NU professor in media product design, advised her through this process and said Zhu has the unique ability to bridge the worlds of computer science and journalism.
“She can really make the things that she envisions happen,” said Gilbert, who is a member of the board of the Students Publishing Company.
Chow, who currently works in the information graphics department at The Washington Post, said she was not surprised Zhu received the scholarship.
“She’s always been doing great work, and she’s always proved herself to have kind of that drive and also the ability to continue learning and build things like this,” Chow said.
Zhu said she will start working on a prototype of LedeHub. She will receive the entirety of the scholarship after she hands in a progress report on her project. She said she may test her system with NU’s campus publications.
