Hack-hack-hackathon!
Last week, I had the honour of participating in the Walkley’s Editors Lab, a 48-hour hackathon encouraging innovation in the media industry. Thanks to the support of Google, Seven West Media were able to send a team along to this fantastic event in Sydney. Luckily for me, I was asked to be part of the 3-person team comprised of a designer, a developer and a journalist.
In this post, I’ll be openly sharing the journey we went on, from ideation to pitch. There were plenty of highs and lows. Join me on this 2-day rollercoaster of a ride!
About
The GEN and Walkley Foundation Editors Lab is part of a series of international hackdays hosted by world-renowned media organisations in New York (The New York Times), London (The Guardian), Madrid (El País), Buenos Aires (Clarín), Paris (Le Parisien) and more.
My Seven West Media (SWM) team
It was fantastic to work with these guys; Jake Ginnivan (Digital Development Manager) and Peter Law (Head of News, The Sunday Times).
Jake and I are both part of the digital team so have previously had contact, although because I’m quite new to the SWM, we’ve only just been involved in a few meetings here and there together over these past six weeks. I was very excited to finally work with him on a project!
Jake and I met Peter for the first time a couple of weeks ago, and lucky for us, Pete was very open to us asking him a thousand questions about his day-to-day, the media industry and journalism as a whole.
Both guys were a joy to work with; our conversations were insightful, meaningful and respectful.
Day 1
We arrived at the Fairfax building in Darling Harbour and got taken up the lift to arrive with a friendly greeting at the Google reception on Level 2.
We were welcomed with an impressive breakfast spread to get us started for the day. This kitchen offers a pretty awesome way for Googlers to start the day.
During our initial mingling and hellos, I was excited to realise that I recognised a friendly face in the crowd. It was fantastic to run into Colin , a developer at ABC News, who I had the pleasure of meeting at an event I hosted in Brisbane last year.
Turns out, Colin not only participated in the hackathon last year, but his team also won.
It was fantastic to hear his recap and insights from the previous year.
We all moved into the main room to start the day for the welcomes and introductions.
An inspiring start
We were lucky to hear from five speakers who shared some great insights with us:
- Louisa Graham, the CEO of the Walkley’s Foundation
- Sarah Toporoff, the Programme Manager, Editors Lab
Global Editors Network - Wanning Sun, from the Australia-China Relations Institute
- Danny Teece-Johnson from the National Indigenous Television
- Nic Hopkins from the Google News Lab
We were topped up with some great information and ready to get started!
After some tasty lunch, all of the participants split off into their respective teams and got settled in the areas that they’d be working in.
My team managed to grab us a pretty snazzy boardroom to spend our afternoon in for planning. We only had until 5pm to have our ideas fleshed out and ready to do a mini one-minute pitch session with the room.
So we got started.
The challenge
For this Editors Lab, the theme was:
Connecting with local communities.
We had three questions to break down the problems that we needed to solve:
How can newsrooms better understand and solve the needs of local audiences?
What tools can be useful to highlight community specific reporting?
How do you make national stories relevant to national audiences?
Our process
Step 1: Spitballing ideas
The guys wrote up the above questions on the whiteboard and began capturing their various ideas on cards.
As I listened to the great ideas they were firing off, I took to the whiteboard with a red marker to unpack the questions a little further.
- Understand and solve — Why?
- Local audience — Who is this for our context? Perth readers? Perth Suburb readers? WA readers?
- Community — What is a community? How do we define it?
- Relevant— How do we define and measure relevancy?
While Jake and Pete were very much likely already across the answer to these additional questions that I had, the first task for me personally was to make sense of the whole scenario, particularly because I’m so new to the industry.
Step 2: Reframing context
With these questions to unpack in mind, I asked the guys to help define two things for me so that we were, at a fundamental level, on the same page with our target audience and a shared understanding of our definition of community.
I wanted us to take a human-centered approach by defining who we were solving the problem for. To me, this was as just as important as solving the problem.
I wrote our answers up on the board, then moved to the butchers paper to reframe the ideas and assumptions that we were discussing.
I did this mainly to gain a better understanding of the context that the ideas were coming from and who they impact. As Jake and Pete continued to spitball their excellent ideas around, they were identifying problems that I never knew were problems before. It was so interesting to gain these insights!
I asked them to continue doing so while I listened and mapped out the perspectives on sticky notes.
I sectioned the butchers paper into quadrants and started to stick up and sort the sticky notes into the relevant areas:
- As a journalist, I want: ___
- As a journalist, I don’t want: ___
- As a reader, I want: ___
- As a reader, I don’t want: ___
** It slipped my mind to take a photo of all of the sticky notes! Oopsies.
Step 3: Ranking ideas
There were plenty more great ideas that were added to the cards. Looking at each of them, it became clear to me that each of the ideas either solved a pain point for a journalist or were geared towards solving a problem for a reader. Only one of them seemed to sit in between these two verticals.
Okay, we thought. Now what? We all agreed that we needed to start ranking the value of the ideas. We did this by adding a note on each to determine which of the three questions set to us in the challenge the ideas were able to address.
With that process, we were able to narrow down to 6 ideas that offered more value and discarded the rest.
We quickly moved onto dot voting to narrow the ideas that we wanted to pursue down even further. We each had two votes to assign to the cards and with that action, we reduced our ideas down to four. Great!
** Unfortunately I didn’t take a photo of this process either!
Step 4: Idea unpacking
We took to the whiteboards again to define the problem statement for each idea with the ideal outcome if the problem was solved, underneath.
Phew!
We were pretty happy with this effort and gave ourselves a little pat on the back. We were ready to ask for input from the mentors, so invited them in to get their initial reactions to the direction we were heading and asked for advice along the way.
Sarah Toporoff, the Programme Manager for Editors Lab, asked us some (very welcome) questions and provided great feedback which helped us to, quite quickly, bin 3 of the 4 ideas.
Excellent result! We were on time and on track to start sinking our teeth into the exciting how part.
Step 5: Too good to be true
In hindsight, we probably started high-fiving a little too soon. As we conducted research into how we might be able to use the different types of data sets that were available to us, exploring user flows and examples, we quickly came to the realisation that unfortunately, it wasn’t going to work out quite how we had imagined it in our heads.
After agreeing that we all felt a little lacklustre about it, the room was filled with silence. We were… deflated… one hour to go until our mini-pitches and we were about to scrap — what we thought — was our strongest idea.
Back to the drawing board.
We placed the idea cards that we had binned back on the table and took a good look at everything again.
Golly; how were we going to get ourselves out of this pickle?
Then just like that, in waltzed Nic, one of the mentors who was checking in on the teams. Amazingly, he was able to help us reframe one of the ideas that was up on our board by simply asking us some questions that took as back to the basics again.
Interestingly, one of the things we noted earlier but didn’t resolve, was the issue of our ideas only benefiting either the journalist or the reader, but not both.
We had been dancing around solutions that had common themes, but we were yet to find the connection to them. Until this moment. Hooray!
Pete explained the desire for more quality leads for stories as a journo and Jake recounted a scenario where he wanted to use the tools at his disposal because he had spotted something that affected him. While Jake’s initial thinking was with the tech in mind, for example, leverage off Apple’s Siri and Google Home, it paved the path for us to think about convenience for the community members and how that pairs with the efficiency required with the newsroom.
It became apparent that the fundamental problem that we wanted to solve was a way for people to contact the newsroom quickly and easily, that supports, not hinders, the busy schedules of our journalists.
The concept is so simple, but amazingly, it was something that was yet to be solved.
From there, this concept blossomed.
With 30 minutes to go until pitch time, we didn’t hesitate hitting the whiteboards and breaking down how we’d implement a solution for this problem.
It’s bloody messy, but it made perfect sense to us.
This time, we really high-fived… with gusto.
Day 2
Go time! After a night that involved only moderate, sensible partying (for a change), we were fresh and ready to hustle on the day that really mattered. Coffee’s in hand, this was prototype and pitch day!
The recap
We knew what problem we wanted to solve and how we were going to solve it. Now it was time to narrow the scope and be clear of what we were delivering by 4:30pm. Well, I told the guys we were targeting 4pm, because, you know, things happen...
The objective for me was for us to manage our own expectations of what we’d be delivering and in the process, be kind to our future (4pm) selves, so that we wouldn’t be in a frantic mess come that time. At least, that’s the goal.
Hello again, our whiteboard friend.
Plan first, execute next.
I started us off by jotting down everyone’s expected user experience for two verticals; the audience experience and the journo experience.
We had limited time to put everything together and while some things needed to wait for others to happen, we could certainly get started on the things that could happen in parallel.
From the implementation perspective, there were things that we knew and things that we knew we’d need to research and validate the feasibility of. I had suggested using Twilio to power the text to speech transaction the night before, so on paper this was viable, but the hard yards needed to be done by Jake to go through the API documentation and run a test across their product offerings to give us the good news that we were hoping to hear.
This was the highest priority for Jake and Pete, because it’s the tool that we planned for our prototype to leverage off.
Turns out, it was perfect for our needs.
** I’ll just put it out there that Twilio’s evangelism efforts have been effective, considering that I had only heard of them because I met one of the devs who was a speaker at one of my favourite conferences and they gave me a (really cool) tee…
Just as importantly, we knew that we needed to wireframe the interface and unpack functionality assumptions urgently (my job) and also needed to start work on the pitch (arguably, the most important part of all). That and a million other things.
It was time to organise this chaos into a clear and focused approach.
While everyone was talking through the next steps, logistics and important things we needed to cover, I set us up on a Trello board so that we could capture all our ‘to-dos’, delivery times and who the owner of the tasks would be.
Jake transferred in his dev tasks from his mind to Trello cards, I added in my design related tasks, and Pete got access within minutes to see his research, set up, copywriting and pitch tasks that we had identified in conversation. As a result, we were all clear on what we were each responsible for.
Pete asked some great questions about contingencies and when we’d raise alarm bells along the way. I translated this as check-in points where we would identifying when we’d need to pivot to a fallback to demoing static versions of the prototype.
Full. Steam. Ahead.
** Reflection: I made a mistake in forgetting to tell the team to move their cards into the done pile as they finished their tasks but it was too late by the time I realised. Rookie assumption by me — lessons learned!
The next few hours felt like minutes, that kind of also felt like days, if that makes sense?!
During the process, we kept in mind the evaluation criteria which was broken down into four key parts;
- Editorial Innovation
- User Experience
- Functionality of the prototype
- Implementation
Pete was a champ with the pitch and presentation planning, Jake did his magical code thing, and I did the design and front end styling** things. Before you knew it, submission o’clock rolled around and we couldn’t be prouder of what we achieved in that time.
** My CSS is horrendous because it only needed to work for the demo, please don’t actually look at it!
Summary
The outcome? I’m beyond delighted to announce that we came away with the win! You can check out our very raw prototype for the newsroom message management interface here, although without the number you won’t be able to see the journey of call to transcription.
Also, a disclaimer that it won’t look how it’s supposed to look for you (yet!). Here’s the proof of concept you should check out in the meanwhile ❤️
Anyway, a win?! Not bad for a gal who’s only been in her new role for 6 weeks, if I do say so myself.
Thanks for reading! Please hold down the claps icon below if you enjoyed this or leave a message if you have questions.
Peace out ❤️
