5 takeaways from Open Matter

By Mara Corbett and Tyson Bird

Pete Mortensen welcomes participants to the Open Matter Mizzou workshop.

We spent three days in the middle of Missouri at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute for Open Matter, a workshop aimed to help media companies adopt design thinking. Here’s what we took away:

1 Newsflash: A lot can be done in 20 minutes.

• I wouldn’t have said before this workshop that any meaningful groundwork and a conversation with an expert could happen in 20 minutes. But working under heavy time constraints made me realize it can — and can instantly guide team decisions in the right direction. Going forward, research shouldn’t take weeks or months; We need to set aside a little time to get the ball rolling and do more as needed.

The Matter team shared a business plan template that was easy to understand, complete and share.

Learn about the business, no matter your role:

• Building a business plan was a little uncomfortable for those of us who’d never done it before. How will this product we’re building make money? How will we diversify our revenue? They’re hard questions if you’ve never asked them before. But they’re valuable to ask, because they give you a more complete view of how the whole works. It also helps to think through different revenue models. The Matter team had us re-imagine a sandwich shop using eight different revenue models. This helped us think creatively about making money and wonder what the customer would really want.

Leave assumptions behind:

• Truly open, stream-of-consciousness brainstorming is tough. In the structure of a traditional, day-to-day project meeting, it’s easy to find one answer and stop there. We’re on deadline, right? But the first idea isn’t always the best idea — and this workshop forced us to produce more, quickly. Brainstorming strictly through the lens of desirability first, saving feasibility and viability for later, allows you to generate lots of ideas that get so much closer to what your user — or customer — wants than that very first idea likely did.

You won’t find ‘Spicy Armadillos’ on most org charts — but breaking outside of your usual team can produce amazing results.

Get outside the usual team:

• If you work with the same team as always, you’re likely to keep working the same way as always. Breaking our GateHouse team apart to work with reporters, editors, managers, professors and so on from other media organizations across the country helped us work in a new way as soon as we arrived. Going forward, we need to mix it up more often. There’s a lot of value in setting job titles aside and working together to solve a problem with the user in mind.

Extra, extra: “For newspapers, the biggest sustainable competitive advantage is their network of facts.”

• This was just a brief example while discussing what would give our workshop products a long term shot at success (aka a sustainable competitive advantage), but it stuck with me. The backbone of our long term success is our knowledge of facts and, even more than that, how those facts relate to one another as a network. That’s not to discount all the other elements of success, but it highlights a level of value GateHouse newsrooms are perfectly poised to act on, because every newsroom has more than 500 other publications to turn to in our network. It’s time we leverage that by working together.

The old-fashioned architecture and innovative curriculum at the University of Missouri made it the perfect backdrop for this Open Matter workshop.