We Love Transparency!
Last week in Professor McDonald’s innovation capstone class, Hearst Media representative Alexandra Kanik pitched a concept for a “transparency tool” that streamlines editing in newsrooms and centralizes previously requested public information that can be easily accessed. At the end of the pitch, students were asked to form groups based around projects that need doing, and if they were interested in developing the transparency tool, to introduce themselves to Kanik.
Enter: Areeba Amer, Kenny Jones, Laura Morales and Jimena Pinzon.
We each worked in the Daily Texan, we each have brown hair and we’ve each been dragged through long, tedious editing hours without a decent reference-and-gathering tool for public information. We understand that newsroom editing is falling behind innovation, and that new tools can be made to catch up to the Age of technology, automation and access.
Transparency is crucial to navigating news in an age of dis/misinformation, and each of us believe this tool will bring journalism credibility to those who need it most — the newsrooms. We hope this tool will bring efficiency to an aspect of a newsroom that professionals have struggled with in the past. As a reporter, public information requests can be time consuming and oftentimes one can be left with the data they didn’t mean to request. As an editor, one can struggle with verifying facts made attributed to public information requests. Likewise, editors may struggle with reporters’ pushing back deadlines due to public information requests coming in late.
Theoretically, with this tool, reporters can access previously-requested data to ensure that they aren’t requesting data the newsroom has access to, or simply for more pitches. Likewise, editors can access the database to verify calculations or deductions made from public information requests. Our hope is that this project can help the newsroom as a whole by providing an organized space for reporters and editors alike to access past public information requests from members of the newsroom.
Upon receiving the project, we spent the first few days outlining the project and doing our best to understand what our project will look for here on out. Some of our main tasks included developing personas that represented our target audience group and creating a vision board that laid out our goals for the project as a whole, keeping in mind the different stakeholders. We spent quite a bit of time understanding the purpose of the project so we could complete these tasks fully.
We also had our first meeting with Alexandra to discuss the project goals more in-depth this past week. There was some past work done to brainstorm the project, which we went over and discussed. Alexandra laid out a list of contacts to reach out to. Each contact has spent some time developing a transparency tool for newsrooms, and our goal is to understand how our concept can be developed with the resources we have available. Information is key, and the more angles we can collect, the better.
We begin the research phase next week to understand the market for our product and how we can best develop it.