The journey of a news product: From hackathon to the newsroom
Lauren Rabaino knows hackathons. Leading the Storytelling Studio and Brand Development teams at Vox Media in the Growth and Development brand, she’s been involved in quite a few. We spoke with her last Spring, when she was still on the Vox Product team, about her experience at GEN’s Editors Lab, Vox’s internal hacks and her vision of future newsroom collaboration.
The creative space: The journey of a hackathon idea
Lauren participated in the Editors Lab in Sunnyvale organised by Yahoo! News and GEN back in 2013. At the time, she was the news apps editor at The Seattle Times. The hackathon theme was “Kill the Article” and Lauren’s team decided to tackle contextualisation of the news. Her team built a prototype called “Refocusing the Story”. The hackathon was a chance to explore a new concept outside the typical workday. The Seattle Times had published “hundreds of articles” on the Sonics basketball team wanting to return to the city but they had “no way of tying together the context”. Their solution? A prototype to “replace the article with more of this stream-like narrative of structured data, which should be evergreen, could be updated over time as one canonical source, rather than republishing same information over and over again in many different places.” (See their presentation here.)
Despite initial enthusiasm from the rest of the staff at The Seattle Times, Lauren recalls, “Unfortunately at that time, there was no structure in place at all for us to make anything tangible out of [the prototype].” But that setback didn’t stop Lauren from thinking of how to bring context to news stories. Influenced by the Editors Lab, she wrote a “Prediction for journalism 2014” on contextualisation for that year’s Nieman Lab series.
In speaking with Lauren we were able to peek behind the curtain into a news product’s journey from concept to prototype to full implementation. A couple months later, Lauren got back in touch with the team from Vox she had met in Sunnyvale to discuss job opportunities. Vox’s “explain-the-news” editorial style was a match for Lauren’s storytelling goals. During the recruitment process, “we talked about my project ideas behind it,” she said, referring to Refocusing the Story. “Indirectly my project did influence a lot of the approach that they took on Vox.com’s flagship content type, which is a card stack.” Although the form of a card stack is different from the initial prototype’s feed style, the goal is very similar: “to help serve this need we have for evergreen explanatory news.”
Instead of updating one feed-like explainer piece, as conceptualised with Refocusing the Story, card stacks functions “almost like an FAQ support centre for the news.” She said, “The ideas that do carry through are that you can break the structure out into something a little bit more atomised.”
Hackathons and the cross-functional newsroom
Editors Lab advocates the benefits of cross-functional collaboration in the newsroom. Lauren explains that the prototyping exercise was “empowering” for that group of colleagues: “…We realised we all have a lot of ideas and we are really good at working with each other and we brought that mentality back to the newsroom for our project,” she said. After the hackathon and before her departure to Vox, Lauren and her Editors Lab teammates put together a story package with the investigations team at The Seattle Times. They hadn’t previously worked together. Many hackathons recruit individual participants who then form teams on-site based around project ideas. Editors Lab invites pre-formed teams where the three teammates represent different functions within the same newsroom. As was the case with The Seattle Times, this format easily allows for future collaborations.
One major benefit of hackathons is encouraging people with diverse skill sets to not only address the same issue, but work on the same level. “I think that it’s very easy to fall into a trap where people who are building things are treated like the service desk to the editorial teams,” said Lauren. At hackathons, colleagues gain a better understanding of how others work, which contributes to mutual respect and more effective collaboration once the hackathon is over.
Once she arrived at Vox, Lauren quickly adapted to their cross-functional way of working. Vox Media is known for their internal hackathons, their largest is the annual “Vax” (a combination of “Vox” and “hacks”). The week-long event attracts over a hundred participants. Hackathons can be great for working out concepts and quickly churning out prototypes, but innovation culture must be sustained beyond the event itself. “I would not say that hackathons are drivers of innovation. I think that what hackathons do enforce is the kind of culture of collaboration exposure and understanding that are the prerequisites to sustainable innovation,” said Lauren. She warned that a hackathon alone isn’t enough: “In legacy organisations we try to do hackathons, get all these people together and it fell flat every time because it would be a one-time thing. There was never follow-up on our projects. There was never follow-up on making sure that those relationships continued beyond hackathons.”
Newsrooms should adopt the cross-functional structure of a hackathon into everyday work. Lauren said her team was “thinking of replacing our hackathons by embedding our teams with others in a longer, more meaningful and dedicated way to work on experimental storytelling.”
Hackathons still have their place for media. They can be venues for rapid idea generation and prototyping, networking and meaningful connections and teamwork. Great things can be born out of hackathons, but they must not be treated as stand-alone innovation initiatives. Hacking can be the spark, but an entire organisation must be committed to sustaining innovation in media.
