School of informatics

Department of computer science

Undergr
aduate
Project Title :- News and Information system
For SNNPR radio and television agency
Group members ID
1. Mihret Demissie……………………………………………………………………...CS/0058/06

2. Yohannes G/Hiwot…………………………………………………………………..CS/0211/08

3. Azeb Taye………………………………………………………………………………..CS/0040/08

4. Tesfu Amsale…………………………………………………………………………..CS/0192/08

5. Yonatan Awol………………………………………………………………………….TCS/0242/09

Advisor Name: Dr. V. Anitha Signature ______________

 Acknowledgement
First of all we would like to thank GOD for his unlimited supports and
keeping all of us healthy. We have overcome lots of problems with the
help of GOD. And we would also like to thank our advisor Dr. V. Anitha
for all her supports during our thesis, she was advising us the best way
to achieve our goal and we’ve learnt a lot from her during our
documentation preparation. Dr. V. Anitha has always time for our
questions and her comments during our documentation preparation
have been very valuable. In addition we would like to thank our
coordinator Mr. Yitbarek for his advices of our title, he was the one
supporting us to choose this title. We would also like to thank our
friends for all their advices during our thesis. We would also like to
thank our families for all their supports. We would also like to thank
SNNPR radio and television agency for all their supports during our
thesis preparation, they were volunteer to give us all the information
we need during our thesis preparation. At last we would also like to
thank computer science department heads for allowing us to work on
this project
 ABSTRACT

“The purpose and essence of any News and Information System is the right
information at the right place in the right order at the right time to the right
person at the lowest coast.” News and Information system is a computerized
system designed and programed to deal with day to day operation taking place.
The system is important especially for the user who wants to get updated News
and Information about anything anywhere any time. The purpose of online News
and Information system is to deliver 24/7 updated information without any coast
and its advantage is multitasking, more news choices in depth and background
information, customization, the ability to discuss the news with peers, and the
opportunity to talk back to the media. And our aim is to develop software which
is user friendly, simple, fast, and cost – effective. The project outlines all the
process followed to come up with the software that is from analysis to testing the
system. Many reports are accompanied by audio and video from the SNNPR radio
and television agency, while the latest radio bulletins are available to view or
listen to on the site together with other current affairs programs.

The SNNPR news and information system had a number of topic-specific columns
written by journalists and the news are posted by User level-date Entry
Operatory. The best way to be able to tell the information provided by the agency
is by online news and information system because of the coverage of internet
service in Ethiopia and other part of the world. Our aim is to be able to give a
solution on the problems that are raised on most of the multimedia company,
especially on the problem of giving the right information to the user at the perfect
time.
Abbreviations and acronym
List of technical words used in the system and their meaning

Term Definition

GUI Graphical User Interface

SQL Structure Query Language

PHP Hypertext Preprocessor

HTML Hypertext Markup Language

JS Java Script

CSS Cascading Style Sheet

UML Unified Modeling Language

XAMP Linux Apache MySql PHP

LAN Local Area Network

SRS Software Requirement Specification

SNNPR Southern Nation Nationalities and Peoples Representative

 Chapter One
1. Introduction
Now a day it is known that the lack of information is causing many problems in
our country, to solve such problems we need a source that presents information’s
on various situations more accurately. In the current digital era, news has gone
online and comes in various forms simultaneously including television, radio,
podcasts, blogs etc., but opinion polls indicate a falling public trust in the news
media. So we are working on the users to be able give their trust on the news
media.

The growing importance of online news challenges the public sphere. On the one
hand, the Internet offers a great quantity and diversity of political and socially
relevant information for public scrutiny and opens possibilities for deliberation.
But, on the other hand it could also fragment discourse by allowing great control
to customize the available information. The extent to which media contribute to
the public discourse is largely determined by the extent to which they succeed in
informing their users of public affairs issues.

Our news and information project merely focuses on presenting accurate

information for the users. This document is organized into different sections. The
first section describes introduction, the scope and limitation of the system to be
developed and mentions some points on the objectives of the project,
methodologies, acronyms and abbreviations. The second section will discuss
about overview of existing system and statement of the problem, it also discusses
about the proposed system, functional and non-functional requirements of the
new system. The third section is system analysis, system modeling, use case
identification, actor identification, use case description, class diagram, sequence
diagram and other diagram. Finally the document will cover designing of the
system model.
 1.1 background of the organization
SNNPR radio and television agency is a government radio and television
broadcasting company operating in Ethiopia. The agency started broadcasting it’s
radio programs in April 23, 1997 in E.C with the frequency modulation of the
station being 100.9 (FM 100.9). Before having its own station the agency was
working with many other organizations like culture and advertising agency and
SNNPR morning newspaper. Proceeding this way the agency planned to wide its
accessibility and around 2001 and 2002 in E.C the agency widened its accessibility
and opened around 7 new radio station which was addressing 7 regions including
Arbaminch, Hosana, Welkite, Sidama, Gedio, Mizan, and Waka, each of which
also address more than five ethnic groups . Then after three regions (Debub omo
Jinka, Kefa, and Sawla) were added and now the station addresses ten regions. At
this time the station broadcasts programs in 48 ethnic languages. SNNPR radio
and television agency which also have a television site faced many challenges, in
the beginning the station started broadcasting television programs by buying a
five minute air time from ETV (Ethiopian TV) and started broadcasting a program
named “Our region” which was being broadcasted every Saturday, then the
station developed its air time to 15 minutes and then to 30 minutes and through
various challenges it has now it’s own television site named southern TV which
was established in August 17, 2006 E.C having its own satellite, studio and
broadcasts for about 14 hours per a day . Now the time the agency have more
than 350 employees, 3 mediums, one advertising and promotion staff and more
than 10 administrative staffs.
 1.2 Statement of the problem

Now a day as information is being a vital thing for every person, there
should be a mechanism for presenting this information in a brief and
interesting manner. SNNPR news and radio agency as we observed has
many problems in doing this:-

 The organization does not have a website and this make

it difficult to address peoples with information.
 There are some information which needs to be
broadcasted every day because of absence of a website
 Many important documents are not computerized yet.
 The organization does not support live score updates
 Information to be broadcasted in radio and television
goes through various steps.
 There is no mechanism for the agency to get feedback
from the audiences.

The above listed problems and many other problems can be resolved
by developing an interactive website for the organization which helps
the users to interact with the organization and also interaction between
the organization officers.

1.2.1 Existing system

The current News and information system has changed dramatically in

the developed world, when we come to our country the new media
platforms have emerged, there have been significant regulatory
changes and News Corporation have conglomerated. Popular opinions
holds that this rapid transformation of the industry, by facilitating
concentration of ownership, has led to a deterioration in the quality of
news offered by the mainstream media and reduced the diversity of
opinions expressed.

From what has gone before, it is clear that the radio industry is
complex. No one is completely satisfied with the way it produces
programs or with its relations to the government. Its difficulties grow
out of the fact that it has more than one function. It renders a definite
public service by communicating, recording, and reporting news, ideas,
and events for the public. But also, as an advertising medium for some
dozens of industries, it operates to make profits for those industries
and for itself. SNNPR radio and television agency is well known for its
radio and television programs broadcasting, in the current situation of
the agency the customers are unable to get information’s at the time
they want it to get. As we know when a radio program is being
broadcasted the audience must be on the frequency of that station
with their phone or other devices to follow/attend the program, once
an audience is unable to hear the program and if the time is passed that
user cannot get the information back, this is the major problem of the
station

Despite all of this now a days the current online news and information
system becomes the main source of information for most of the
people. But this online service has drawbacks like Old news in the
media are kept manual way of recording, and In the current situation
the online news and information system become less secured and can
be easily exposed to theft and unexpected damage because of poor
security.
 1.2.2 Major Problems of Existing System

The major problem of the existing system are the following

 It is limited to local areas: - the current news and information

system have been limited to local areas like the SNNPR radio and
television agency have been worked for south nation nationalities
and people of Ethiopia so this has to be global to the whole
Ethiopia.
 It is less user-friendly: - the current system needs more
professional users.
 It requires more number of employees who need to work: - to be
able to give updated information the system needs number of
employees that works as a date entry operator for each section.
 Its present system is very less secure: - easy to hack.
 Lack of immediate retrievals: -the information is very difficult to
retrieve and to find particular information like- E.g. To find out so
many sport game live scores at the same time.
 Lack of immediate information storage: -The information
generated by various transaction takes time and effort to be
stored at right place.
 Lack of prompt updating: -Various changes to information like
difficult situations that are related to political situations and live
score in sport games are very difficult to update in every moment.
 Lack of preparation of accurate and trusted information: -This
becomes a difficult task as trusted information is difficult to
collect from various sources.
 Lack of getting live news: - news that are posted so many days
ago are difficult to get, like soccer live scores.
  No live broadcasting: - live shows from the media is only available
on the satellite television.

From what we know the agency we are working with does not have a
website at the current situation. And the agency also give us these
common problems despite of the above problems: -
 The agency does not have a website
 Products requiring technical knowledge cannot be advertised successfully
through radio
 Since many advertisements in radios has to be brief, all the relevant
information cannot be given.
 As visual effects are totally absent in radio, the advertiser cannot expect the
desired impact
 Often too many advertisements are broadcast at a time. Therefore, it is
doubtful whether each one can leave a lasting impression on the listener.
 Television advertising is very expensive and as advertisements has to be brief,
every relevant information about the product cannot be given.
 One of the biggest disadvantages to radio communication technology is the
limited range of a radio signal. Even a powerful radio signal is only capable of
reaching receivers within a specific geographic region, requiring that a vast
network of radio stations be set up to communicate effectively to a large or
spread out group of receivers.
 Radio signals are also susceptible to interference from atmospheric conditions
and other broadcasts. In addition, it can be hard to receive a clear signal from
certain locations, such as areas shielded by mountains.
 Most of the time some instruments used in radio and television stations may
stop working unexpectedly, this time it will be difficult to replace those
instruments immediately since they are imported from abroad country,
therefore the transmission may stack.
 Advertisements in the midst of interesting programs only irritate the viewers.
Using the remote, they either switch off the TV or change the channel during
advertisements.
 1.2.3 Proposed System
The proposed systems of the project are:

 With less cost and effort, the users are able to get accurate information
 Provide security mechanism and different access level in the system
 To develop easy and understandable user interface that is more user
friendly
 The proposed system enables users to choose between languages
 It covers business, political, social, sport, entertainment, health, and
technological news
 It also contains accumulation of old news
 It contains live radio broadcast
 The proposed system has an administrative level that is in charge of
controlling all of the rest users.
 It contains online weather condition.
 The proposed system also has a live score, tables, fixture lists and so on.
 It also contains advertisements.

1.2.4 Advantage of proposed system

Online news services have many uses, and for this reason, this service has a great
deal of advantages. These include:

 Unlike when watching the news on TV, or when listening to it on the radio,
online news services allow the user to choose which articles they hear,
watch, or read. This is useful, as people don’t waste their time on articles
that don’t interest them, they only get informed about what does interest
them.
 News articles from around the world can all be accessed from one place,
there is no need to switch between multiple websites to get news from
different countries.
 It’s free, unlike buying newspapers which can cost.
  There is no limit to how many articles one can read. With newspapers,
people can only read the articles contained within the newspaper.
 Newspapers cannot update themselves, because they are physical, so if a
story has had some advantages, people will have to wait for, and but the
next issue to learn about it. When an article is online, it can be updated
automatically, so all updates are instant and there is no need to wait for
these to be put in place.
 Online news services have the ability to make articles more interactive.
Videos can be embedded into articles alongside text and pictures when the
article is virtual; it is impossible to embed videos in newspapers because
they are physical, and cannot be edited.
 It is more economical compared to all other methods of news distribution,
as all that is needed is a journalist, and a website for the journalist to post
the article on. With newspapers, paper is necessary; so many trees have to
be cut down. Also, there is the need of ink, large printers, and distributors
as well as the journalist who investigates an event.

1.3 scope and limitation of the project

1.3.1 Scope of the Project

Now the time in our country information is being a vital thing for every
people and there are more problems on addressing peoples with the
right information at the right time in the right place, so our project
mainly focuses on helping peoples to get the exact information on time.
Our news and information system project covers the following major
things, all the political, social, environmental, sport and business news
in two different languages (Amharic and English) that are concerned
with SNNPR since the project is mainly for SNNPR radio and television
agency. As we all know politics in Ethiopia is making peoples kill each
other because of the wrong information’s posted on Facebook,
telegram and other social medias so our project provides peoples with
the right information since the institution we are working for gets
accurate information from the source, we also know that there is a
problem of live score updates of Ethiopian premier league games and
peoples are facing problems while there team is playing in Addis Ababa
or somewhere else and they are calling somebody else to know about
the game information, so our project enables users to follow the games
with the live scores and vital information about the game including the
time the game begins, lineup, ball possession, yellow cards, red cards,
number of passes and so on, it also includes tables, next fixtures,
previous game history, and all the tournaments. Old news are also
available if anyone wants to read any news posted before are
available .The project also have some entertainments, In addition to
this it also covers some entertainments, political, sport and other useful
information beyond Ethiopia.

1.3.2 Limitation of the project

Our proposed system will also has disadvantages paired with it. These
include:

 Just because the article is online, it doesn’t mean it is no longer

biased. Most media is biased, views expressed are almost always
one sided.
 With more and more news outlets putting a greater focus on
providing online news services, this could result in a cut in jobs, as
to operate on the internet, fewer personnel are required.
  Websites could crash if lots of people try accessing them for a
major news story; if the site crashes, nobody can access it for a
short while
 Some technical issues regarding the website could occur, resulting
in the website having to go offline temporarily. This will ultimately
mean that people will not be able to access the website, and so
could turn to competitors of the offline news site.

1.4 Objective
1.4.1 General Objective
The general objective of this project is to develop a news and information website
for SSNPR radio and television station.

1.4.2 Specific Objective

To achieve the general objectives of the project, the proposed system consists of
the following specific objectives:

 To make the system user friendly

 To understand the functional requirements of the proposed system
 Selecting the best solution
 Suggest possible solutions
 Analyze the current system
 Designing the system with appropriate methodologies and tools
 Developing a database that will be used by the system
 Implement and test the system using a chosen programming language
and paradigm
 1.5 Methodology
1.5.1 Data collection methodology
During data collecting method, data needed for the project will be gathered from various
sources. During gathering and collecting necessary data and information need for system
analysis, we will use two major fact-finding techniques those are primary source and secondary
source. In primary source we will use empirical approach such as interview and observation. In
secondary source we obtain data from different document. We have used /and will be using
different methodology to collect data. Such as:-

Interview: The team use interviews to collect information from individuals or from groups.
The respondents are generally current users of the existing system or potential users of the
propose system.

Observation: Through observation, our team can obtain firsthand information about how
activities are carried out. The teams know the way how the current radio and television
agency system is performed so as to overcome the problem what we have observed, at that
time the team understands how much the process is tedious and require high human power
to accomplish the process as a software development is a process requiring a team work.

Document Analysis: For more information about the existing system we refer relevant
documents and other reading materials.

System Analysis and Design Methodology

When developing information systems, most organizations use a standard of

steps called the systems development lifecycle (SDLC) at the common
methodology for systems development. SDLS includes phases such as planning,
analysis, design, implementation, and maintenance. At the heart of systems
development, analysis and design are the second and third phases of SDLC.A
software development process can be viewed as a series of transformations,
where the output of one transformation becomes input of the subsequent
transformation. One of the transformations named system analysis translates the
users’ needs into system requirements and responsibilities. As we have tried to
analyze the current system of SNNPR radio and television agency, it is more a
manual work in the organization which needs to be computerized. The agency
had a website previously but it’s been hacked and the agency is now facing
problems in organizing documents and is in need of the website. The second
transformation (design) begins with a problem statement and ends with a
detailed design that can be transformed into an operational system. It includes
the bulk of software development activity. We are following Object Oriented
Software development approach. Object-oriented design is an approach to
systems development that proposes the use of system objects to build new
systems and rebuild old ones. An important goal of object-oriented development
is to change the nature of traditional software development from designing and
writing models from scratch to building systems through the assembly of reusable
software objects. An object orientation produces systems that are easier to
evolve, more flexible, more robust, and more reusable than a top-down
approach. An object orientation provides the following main attributes:- it allows
higher level of abstraction, provides seamless transition among different phases
of software development, encourage good development techniques, promotes
reusability and so on. The tool which we use during development of this system is
listed as follows:

I. Use case diagram

II. Class diagram
III. Sequence diagram
IV. User interface diagram

System implementation
System implementation refines the detailed design into the system deployment
that will satisfy the users’ needs. It represents embedding software product
within its operational environment. The purpose of system implementation is
making the new system available to a prepared set of users and positioning on-
going support and maintenance of the system within the performing organization.
Our team members choose object oriented programming coding method over
traditional structural programming languages. OOP facilitates writing applications
by turning real-world objects into code components and it enables users to model
real world objects. Other reasons also include: -
  Modularity- the source code for a class can be written and maintained
independently of the source code for other classes.
 Information-hiding- by interacting only with an object’s methods, the
details of its internal implementation remain hidden from the outside
world
 Code-reuse-if a class already exists, you can use objects from the class in
your program
 Easy debugging: if a particular object turns out to be a problem, you can
simply remove it from your application and plug in a different object as its
replacement.
 Encapsulation: once an object is created, knowledge of its implementation
is not necessary for its use.
 Provides flexibility in the modification of an existing application
 Enables the use of real-world modeling
 Helps with the maintenance of code
1.5.2 Testing and Deployment Methodology
1.5.3 Development Environment
Below is a list of the minimum Hardware and software requirement to develop
the system News and Information system for SNNPR radio and television agency:-

Hardware Tools

 Computer fewer than 5 years old.

 Processor: Minimum 1GHz; Recommended 2Gz or above
 Ethernet connection (LAN) OR a wireless adapter (Wi-Fi)
 Hard Drive: Minimum 32 GB; Recommended 64 GB or more
 Memory (RAM): Minimum 1 GB; Recommended 4GB or above
 CD/DVD or flash drive more than 2GBfdriver

Software Tools

 Microsoft SQL Server

 Operating System: - Windows 7 and above.
 Browser: -Chrome, Mozilla Firefox…
 Microsoft Office
 Adobe Acrobat Reader
 Adobe Flash Player: flash player allows you to enjoy contents with graphics.
The validation used for each user interface is listed below

End users
The end users can be any user who visits the website. To get information’s posted in the
website immediately, the users has the privilege to subscribe the website. Once a user
subscribes the website, he/she will be able to find all the news on his /her email account. When
a user first subscribes, he/she must enter an email address and then click the subscribe button.
Then the confirmation code will be sent to his/her email and by filling this confirmation code,
the user will be able to get all the news immediately. While filling the subscribe field the user
may leave the field empty or insert an invalid email address. If the field is left empty the system
will notify the user that he/she left the field empty and this validation is done by using java
script. If the user also inserts an invalid email address, that will be verified using java script. The
other thing the user can do is that they can contact the agency. When doing this there are fields
that the user must fill like first name, last name, email address, and messages. All the validation
for these fields is done by java script on the client side. Other than this any user can simply view
the news posted on the website without any other requirement.

Administrator
The administrator passes through some type of validation to go through the system. This
validation helps to insure that whether a correct administrator is trying to access the system or
not. The administrator’s dashboard is different from what the users can directly access. It is
accessed only by the person who’s been given the administrator privilege. The administrator
first needs to log in into the system to perform all the actions done by him/her. To identify the
authorized administrator, the admin must fill the username and password field correctly to
successfully log in into the system. The username and password of the admin will be stored in
the database. When the administrator tries to enter his username there may be three
possibilities:-

 A valid user name

 An invalid user name
 He may leave the field empty

The same way when he fills the password filed, he may enter the valid password, the invalid
one and may leave it empty. So the system needs to check every possibility to validate the
admin. First if the admin fills the valid user name and the valid password, the system should let
the admin to successfully log into the system. This is done by checking the username and the
password of the admin from the database. If the user name and the password inserted by the
admin is the same as the username and the password in the database then the admin must be
able to log in into the system. This is done by PHP and JQuery. The PHP script is used to check
the valid username and password on the server side and the JQuery is used to check whether
the field is filled or not without going to the server side, meaning in the client side. The user
name and password the admin will enter will be stored in a variable and when the user enters
the log in button, then the system will check for the correct user name and password by cross
checking with the username and password stored in the database and if they are the same then
the admin will log in into the system successfully. If any of the field is left empty then an error
message will be displayed for the admin. And if the admin enters the correct username and an
incorrect password, then also an error message will be displayed for the admin. It is only if the
user name and password matches, the admin can successfully log in into the system. The code
to do this is listed below

If ($_SERVER[‘ REQUEST_METHOD’] == ‘POST’){

$username = mysqli_real_escape_string( $_POST [‘username’])
$password = mysqli_real_escape_string( md5($_POST [‘password’]))
If(empty($username)){
echo ”username must be filled ”;
}
else If(empty($password)){
echo ”password must be filled ”;
}
else {
$query = “SELECT User_Name, Password FROM admin_table WHERE User_Name = ‘$username’
AND Password = ‘$password’”;
$result = mysqli_query($query);
if($result)
{
$value = mysqli_fetch_assoc($result)
$row = mysqli_num_rows($result)
if($row>0){
echo “successful”;
}
else{
echo “no result found”;
}
}
else{
echo “username and password do not much please check it again”;
}
}

After successfully log into the system the admin will be the one controlling the operators inside
the system. He is responsible for creating accounts for the data entry operators, the article
managers, and the news managers. This validation is important to ensure that the
administrator successfully created an account for these users. The administrator will register
the data entry operators, the article managers and the news managers by filling fields like first
name, last name, gender, role, username. First all the operators need to have an email account,
and the information about the person to be registered will be given to the administrator. The
administrator then fills all the information given to him about the operators and when he
enters the register button then the password will be generated automatically and the username
and password of the operator will be sent by his/her email address. All this verifications are
done simply by java script.
Data entry operator
The data entry operators are registered by the administrator. When being registered, they
provide information’s like their name, email and other information’s. If the email address they
gave to the administrator is valid, then they will get a token (a link to the data entry operator
dashboard) else they have to go back to the administrator and give their valid email address.
After clicking on the link, the data entry operator will go to the log in page to his/her
dashboard. As we tried to describe above it is the administrator who sends the data entry
operator a password and a user name. The data entry operator then can log into the dashboard
after filling the username and password field. When filling the field if the data entry operator
left the field empty, error message will be displayed using java script validation. If the user
name and the password do not much, the validation is done by using PHP like the validation in
the admin log in page. If the username and password is correct, then the data operator can
successfully log into the dashboard. The other thing in the data operator’s dashboard is the
field used to insert the different types of news. After writing all the news the data operator
clicks the upload button which will send all the news to the news manager. When clicking the
upload button if the field is empty, the system will notify the data entry operator that he can’t
leave the place empty and this is done using java script. Other ways if there is a data inside the
field, that data will be uploaded to the news manager.