It’s all about the process
Or one Knight Foundation News Challenge application. This is what we’ve been working on for the last month or more. Or rather what Annie and David Calvert started talking about two years ago and I joined recently and we wrote up last night.
Annie Flanzraich tells us how it started:
Two years ago David and I were having coffee and talking about journalism, one of our favorite past times. I was the editor of The Nevada Sagebrush at the time and David asked me what I would do if the paper’s budget was cut in half.
“I’d kill the print product,” I said.
Two years and uncountable questions later, here’s where we are.
After a few recent, serious months, we assembled pieces for our application (web design, budget brief, staff list) and started revising our ideas more.
Donica was able to get us a complimentary meeting with IDEO – inventors of Swiffer, the first Microsoft computer mouse, “Keep the Change” for Bank of America and PDA 4 – a few weeks ago. We learned a lot about how to approach our product and how to observe people. We wish we could go back and get follow ups but they’d probably start charging us.
In our meeting we started rough as we weren’t sure whether to talk about our Knight project application or journalism more generally. Our consultant seemed to want to talk about the project – fine with us – but didn’t know much about it. He started with what made two local newspapers different and we were a bit confused.
We worked our way into the fact that it’s a web-only news product, so he changed gears and started the IDEO process. Parts 1 and 2: Defer Judgment, Wild uncompromising ideas.
Starting down a train of thought answering “How does a community best tell news?” lead us to intense crowd sourcing using mobile text-based news. Think of Porch Brigaides, Gossip Moms, Bartender News all aggregated to a single web site with no newsroom.
That kind of freaked us out and was what we considered extremely bad for the community with mostly invaluable information, potential libel across the board and no filter.
The next method helped us much more: observation. Our consultant brought out images of someone’s life from a single day. A still pool, groceries, dishes, buddies, kids, a wife all adourned the marker-board wall. Our job was to name him, figure out his values, priorities, daily life, etc., then figure out how his life intersects news and where he needs news.
I’ll make a separate post about him.
But anyway, we revised and revised and revised. We still had to leave a lot out of the application because of the character space. Our product is huge and it covers a lot of things but hopefully in two weeks we’ll be writing out the full proposal and we’ll get to include everything.
Read the application linked above and leave your comments.