Acknowledgements Over the course of this research project we had help from many people deserving of our gratitude. We would like to thank Emily Bell for not just giving the project a home, but also for creating a place—the Tow Center—where projects with magical cat mascots are not simply tolerated but encouraged. We are tremendously grateful to Fergus Pitt, who skillfully guided our research and provided valuable feedback on each successive version of our drafts. Thanks to Taylor Owen, who shepherded the project in its initial stages, and Claire Wardle, who joined us toward the end but whose key questions helped us move to completion. We also thank Lauren Mack, Elizabeth Boylan, and Abigail Ronck for all their help in dotting every i and crossing every t along this journey.
We are tremendously grateful to Dana Chinn, who gave valuable feedback and organized the first-ever NewsLynx Users’ Summit from which we were able to plan platform improvements and see what worked and what didn’t. The project owes a great deal to Lauren Furhmann, whose involvement, feedback, and support were beyond instrumental to the life of NewsLynx (and yet, who is not to be trusted in a game of Werewolf). The same goes for Lindsay Green-Barber and Blair Hickman, with whom we had many conversations over the years about what they catalogue as impact and, perhaps more importantly, what impact could be.
The project would not be what it is without the artwork of Clarisa Diaz, who brought Merlynne Jones to life in myriad forms—including animated GIFs. We thank Alastair Dant for his feedback on the NewsLynx visual design and the acute observation that the initial comparison interface didn’t make sense at all, leading to renewed research and a workable redesign.
We also thank the staff of Charlotte’s Patisserie, who tolerated our laptops from opening to closing almost every single weekend between July and October, and those employees at numerous other haunts where we passed shorter work stints. And, as always, we thank our friends and family for their support and understanding. June 2015