Get me rewrite

A collaboration between students at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and the Cedar Rapids, Iowa Gazette has launched the demonstration project News Mixer, as reported by NU staff. News Mixer is a local news site powered by Facebook Connect, which provides the authentication mechanism; comments made by a reader of news stories appear in that member’s Facebook newsfeed. The experimental News Mixer provides three levels of structured commenting, from short quips to long-form letters to the editor. It’s assembled from open source tools—Wordpress, MySQL, Trac, and Django—as recorded in the project’s blog, Crunchberry Project. The project is one of the early fruits of a new program of scholarships to Medill for talented programmers and web developers, granted by the Knight Foundation.