Design and Evaluation of a Location-Based Mobile News Reader

The Locanews project aims to create and investigate location-based news services for mobile phones. We have developed a system to support such services consisting of an authoring tool for journalists to write and publish geo-tagged news, and a reader tool for mobile phones with web browsers. Here we present the design of the reader tool and the the evaluation approach used to assess the software as well as the journalistic concept underlying Locanews. The evaluation was conducted as a field experiment where journalist students wrote news articles, and a group of respondents tested the mobile software for accessing and reading these news articles. Quantitative and qualitative data about the respondents´ impressions were collected and analyzed. The respondents found both the software and the journalistic concept easy to understand.