Author: Michael Higdon | 03.11.2009

I finally have a chance to sit down and write about the Future of Journalism Think Tank at the Reynolds School of Journalism’s J Week. To make it easier to digest and easier to write, I’m breaking it up into six parts, that way if you don’t care about certain sections you can skip them. If you want the whole story, you can read it all.

To make it all easier, here’s a table of contents for the six parts:

1. The Process
2. Discoveries and highlights
   
3. Group 1 prototype
   
4. Group 2 prototype
5. Group 3 prototype
6. Critique & launching point

DISCOVERIES AND HIGHLIGHTS

First, I’ll introduce everyone who was there to give the think tank historical significance:

• Steve Bishop (IDEO profile), project leader, global lead of sustainability, IDEO
• Nicole Oncina (linkedin), business development, consumer experience design, IDEO
• Kris Woyzbun (standford article), IDEO
• Alex Grishaver (linkedin), practice lead, new media, IDEO
• August E. (“Augie”) Grant (faculty page), associate professor, University of South Carolina
• Thomas Brew (linkedin), deputy editor, MSNBC.Com
• Anthony Moor (portfolio), deputy managing editor/interactive, The Dallas Morning News
• Alan Mutter (blog), Blogger, Reflections of a Newsosaur
• Dennis Dimick, Executive Editor, Environment, National Geographic, ddimick@ngs.org
• Mary Peskin (API bio), associate director, American Press Institute
• Dwayne Spradlin (InnoCentive bio), president and CEO, InnoCentive.com
• Jennifer Carroll (Gannett release), vice president/digital content, Gannett Co.
• Michael Maness (Gannett release), vice president/innovation and design, Gannett Co.
• Rob Curley (blog), president and executive editor, Greenspun Interactive
• Jerry Ceppos (faculty page), dean, Reynolds School of Journalism
• Larry Dailey (faculty page), professor, Reynolds School of Journalism
• Donica Mensing (faculty page), associate professor, Reynolds School of Journalism
• Michael Higdon (portfolio), student, University of Nevada
• David Calvert (portfolio), freelance photojournalist, University of Nevada alum

Phew, that’s quite a list. Onward.

In the last blog post (see above) I laid out the IDEO process and as I said that usually takes 3 weeks to 3 years. Well, our IDEO leaders managed to squeeze the process into less than 36 hours. I won’t go through the whole thing because that’s laborious, but I want to point out important points in the agenda.

First I should note that we broke up into three groups that kept changing throughout the day.

How are you really?

We started the day by slapping post-it notes onto our bodies that explained our thoughts at the time. Many ranged from “I’m excited to save journalism” to “Should I buy a house in Reno?” I thought this was a more useful way to get to know one another and find common topics for discussion.

Interestingly, older members of the group seemed more concerned with their daily activities, home lives, work and then the think tank. Younger members were the opposite.

Newscast #1

Our first exercise was to write a newscast about journalism five years from now.

It was really easy to be super negative with references to the Epic 2015: Googlezon video about Google’s news service that invents information. More importantly though, the video starts out saying that no news organizations have survived.

So great start right? Not really.

Luckily we curbed the negative future for something more positive and Augie acted out a customer bombarded by customized news and advertisements from his cell phone and nearby billboards.

Apparently Augie REALLY likes Cola Slurpees

The other groups came up with similar ideas but the point was clear: mobile platforms, no paper, custom content, fragmented, decentralized news.

Whose life?

This is an important exercise. Each group gets a series of photos from a day-in-the-life of some person. Our purpose is to discover the name, values, habits, lifestyle, etc. of this person.

We are not to figure out how to insert our product into that peron’s life but simply to identify that peron’s life, then act it out for the rest of the group. This exercise helps you understand and identify different people.

Later you can see how a product may enhance that person’s life or how a person may naturally intersect a product. The exercise helped us realize how news (in particular, but anything works here) is not the center of most people’s lives. Only one of the groups had an image with a news product in it (San Jose Mercury News). But one of the groups said they thought their person used Twitter even though there was no evidence (a big no-no).

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

Prototype

We are then supposed to think of practical ways to make these things happen then draw them, flesh out details and act out or explain it all. Unfortunately, this is where we had to stop to go present. The ideas were just beginning to surface too.

That will lead to the next three parts describing the prototypes.

Wild ideas

A few errant ideas the entire group thought of that have real merit:

• Robot news force: Augie jokingly thought of having robots that drive around collecting and dispersing news. This is actually not a bad idea if you make it less scary. Think of mobile news kiosks (or stationary) that collect news from people via a camera or keyboard as well as have news screens displaying news
• News tattoos: Michael Maness thought of having temporary news tattoos. But what if you had people on the streets with news tattoos on them, especially in NYC and similar cities. You could read the news on someone’s back while you walk behind them in a crowd or wait at a cross walk. These could be printed just as easily as newspapers (or easier). And they’d be short. This only works in the summer though.

That said, let’s move to the prototypes.