Contextual interviews

at “The Daily” at UW

We conducted contextual interviews at The Daily, which is a student run newspaper at the University of Washington, Seattle. We visited their newsroom during peak activity hours of 9-11 PM. We spoke to their Editor-in-Chief, Content Editor and Arts Editor, and observed the workflow.
We wanted to understand the publishing industry, specifically print publishers who were starting to also have a digital presence. This was also important since we started looking at content creation as a possible direction in addition to how content is consumed. Going in we wanted to understand the pros and cons of both mediums, their motivations and opinions regarding print vs. digital medium. We also wanted to get a firsthand look at their workflow and ask them questions in context that might help us understand these things better.

Findings and Insights
Publications like the Daily have a very complex workflow. There is a lot of back and forth exchange of content and media between writers, editors, designers and photographers. They currently use multiple tools, and in some cases have to use different sharing platforms for different types of media. This further adds to the complexity. A better collaborative system
would be more supportive of this complicated exchange and editing process.
It was apparent that they were aware of the need to work towards integrating interactivity and keeping updated on the digital platform, however, access to the required resources and expertise emerged as a deterrent. The usefulness of a seamless way of integrating media and
interactive elements like audio, video, slideshows etc also came up in this observation. In terms of comparing their digital vs. print presence, surprisingly, we found that print is still their first priority and most stories — with the exception of breaking news stories that need immediate push — are published for print and converted to the digital version with additional
content as a later step. However, they do maintain an active digital presence on social media websites like Facebook and Twitter and have an iPad app. An insight we gathered here was regarding how social media changes the way news is consumed. Their statistics showed that for most online content, most hits come via social media links, and this is the main reason
their homepage gets low views.