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CRITIQUE & LAUNCHING POINT

Throughout the two-day think tank, many important themes continued to rise to the surface: community journalism, user customization, paperless/mobile, engaging/fun content.

Below, I want to describe some of the observations I made about the process and the people as well as briefly critique each prototype. Then make some kind of inspirational statement about what happens next.

Observations

It was very difficult for us all to break out of our comfort zones. I likened our first day to us playing Pong, tossing the same ideas back ‘n’ forth inside of a box. Many of us came prepared to talk about our areas of interest or our own ideas but IDEO does not work on a predestined premise. Their approach is meant to create ideas from scratch based on everyone’s knowledge.
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GROUP 2 PROTOTYPE

The concept

This group wanted to develop a point system on a news website. For every activity users do, they receive points. People receive more or less points depending on their level of engagement. For example, commenting on a story nets maybe 2 points, but writing your own story is worth 10.

The site basically becomes a customized delivery system with an incentive to participate in democracy. [...]

DISCOVERIES AND HIGHLIGHTS

How might we?

The rest of the day was spent identifying a series of problems in journalism. I unfortunately can only speak for my group but I think these were important points:

• News is horribly fragmented/decentralized
• Journalists produce for journalists because there is no reliable system of feedback from readers
• If readers need to learn “media literacy” there is a design flaw in media

With these and other problems, we must ask “how might we do X?” This is the part where we get to be wild and crazy. Here you come up with questions surrounding these problems.

Brainstorm

On day two we get to brainstorm ways to solve these how might we questions. For these we thought of a few ideas:

• Decentralized news: Create a system that allows people to get all of their news in one place.
• Journalists for journalists: Create a people’s choice awards for journalism. Pulitzer Prizes are all well and good but not when they don’t measure the impact of a story on a community. Or do a reality show about journalism where people can vote on their stories or journalists (Las Vegas Sun internship on TV). Or make a system, such as Spot.Us where readers assign stories instead of editors

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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 [...]

If you blow up everything you think is real and start over from scratch based on the needs of the community and tools of the newsroom, I think a newsroom could look like this (below). The idea came from a class Donica and I are brainstorming about. We want to do something that’s similar to [...]