News organizations are constantly balancing usability and aesthetics in the presentation of digital content. Favoring one side too heavily can detract from the journalism itself, whether it’s because the content’s presentation does too much or not enough to engage audience members. The rising use of interactive, audio and visual content to present complex stories has only heightened the need for balance, making it imperative for news organizations to carefully consider how they present content.

As they weighed this question, InvestigateWest, an investigative news organization based in Seattle, Washington, decided to redesign their website last year to expand their capacity for presenting audio, visual and data-driven stories.

“Our website hadn’t been updated in a number of years,” said Allison Augustyn, the executive director of InvestigateWest. “It became very clear that design matters to our readers and usability matters to us, but I had a lot of questions about the kind of technological support we’d need to improve these areas.”

The relationship between CMS and design

InvestigateWest’s website uses WordPress as a CMS. WordPress powers nearly 40% of all websites worldwide and is widely used among news websites. Part of its appeal comes from its expansive array of plugins, which are used to expand the functionality and customization of their websites. Plugins can perform functions like improving a website’s ability to track analytics, share content and prevent security breaches. WordPress also offers thousands of available themes, making it easy for a news organization to try out different layouts and designs without creating them from scratch.

InvestigateWest’s website used a WordPress theme called Largo, which the Institute for Nonprofit News designed specifically for news publishers. The version of Largo used for InvestigateWest’s website was outdated, making it difficult for them to use the theme to support their goals of publishing more custom story presentations and experimenting with different types of media.

News Catalyst partnered with InvestigateWest last fall to answer questions they had regarding digital security, artificial intelligence and web design, like if they could continue using the Largo theme to meet their new presentation goals or if they should switch to a different website theme.

Switching WordPress themes is less intensive than switching to a different CMS altogether, but it is still an involved process because WordPress themes affect how a website functions in addition to how it looks, said Tyler Fisher, deputy director of technology for News Catalyst. News Catalyst ultimately recommended that InvestigateWest switch to a WordPress theme called Salient, which was designed by ThemeNectar. Salient comes with a greater flexibility for building and designing pages, which would make it easier for InvestigateWest to publish audiovisual content and create unique layouts for more involved stories.

“What’s really nice about Salient is you can use their building blocks to design whatever you want,” Fisher said. “It’s worth noting that doing so takes some design skill, so you need to know some general design principles before creating your web page.”

Using plugins for Salient, InvestigateWest has added features to their website like larger photos, a glossary for the scientific terms used in their stories and audio readings of their stories, Augustyn said.

“It’s beautiful,” Augustyn said. “Salient is endlessly usable. On the back end, it’s very easy to upload and update stories, and it’s just so much cleaner.”

Switching WordPress themes can usually take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months, especially if a news organization has more than a decade of published content like InvestigateWest. However, InvestigateWest was able to switch themes over the course of one weekend because they received help from a team of coders through Seattle GiveCamp, a nonprofit organization that provides technological support to nonprofits in the Seattle area. Other news organizations hoping to switch WordPress themes do not have to enlist a team of coders to help them because changing themes doesn’t involve writing code, Fisher said. However, receiving help from a graphic designer may be useful, he added.

Redesigning for the right reasons

InvestigateWest has received only positive feedback on the design of their website since switching WordPress themes, Augustyn said. They have also experienced more engagement with their stories, but this may be because they are doing more collaborative work with other news organizations, she added.

“It’s been a huge team boost and point of pride,” Augustyn said. “We’re a digital-only outlet, so it’s even more important to make sure that what you’re seeing on the screen is beautiful, understandable, approachable and makes you proud of the product.”

In the future, InvestigateWest wants to continue advancing their digital strategy by incorporating more data visualizations in their stories and publishing videos on their data collection methods. This will help them teach other journalists and promote transparency in their reporting, like explaining how journalists file FOIA requests, Augustyn said.

The success of InvestigateWest’s website redesign underscores how important it is for news organizations to ensure their digital content is both compelling and user-friendly.

“It’s great when you can pull off a really powerful visual story, but I think the journalism world holds them up a little too much,” Fisher said. “I’m not convinced that those stories necessarily have more journalistic impact or reach more people.”

Newsrooms with similar goals as InvestigateWest should ask themselves why they want to pursue more complex audiovisual storytelling and whether this will help them produce more impactful journalism, Fisher said. Redesigns should be motivated by a desired outcome, like creating a more interactive experience for readers or visualizing data that is otherwise hard to interpret. For example, InvestigateWest’s goal was to make their storytelling more immersive and provide information in a way that appeals to a wider range of people, regardless of factors like their age, learning style and personal preferences.

News organizations should consider redesigning their websites if their current design is interfering with their business goals, like preventing them from increasing their newsletter subscribers, or storytelling goals, like preventing them from pursuing visual-driven storytelling, Fisher said. A redesign may also be helpful if your current website is slow, does not work on mobile devices or is otherwise hindering your users from accessing your content, he added.

“We’re a digital-only outlet, so it’s even more important to make sure that what you’re seeing on the screen is beautiful, understandable, approachable and makes you proud of the product.”

In April, Local Media Association recognized InvestigateWest with the first place prize for best local website in its 2020 Local Media Digital Innovation Awards. The LMA describes this award stating that judges consider “all aspects including user and customer experience, site design and organization, brand continuity, content, use of photos, graphics and video, opportunities for user engagement, presentation of advertising, mobile adaptability, and more.” The judge’s comment for the InvestigateWest’s placing noted that InvestigateWest’s website was “visually driven, easy to navigate and responsive.”

“We’re so grateful for the recognition of our website redesign,” Augustyn said. “It takes tremendous strategic planning to map out information — especially information dating back 12 years — and we were grateful that our time and effort translated into something beautiful and readable for our audiences that Local Media Association journalists also recognized as valuable.”

Amelia Winger is an editorial fellow for News Catalyst and a student at Temple University. She is the digital managing editor for The Temple News, Temple’s student newspaper, and news director for WHIP Radio, Temple’s student radio station.

Redesigning with purpose: Investigate West’s new website design creates opportunities for… was originally published in News Catalyst on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

From News Catalyst and LION

Today we’re proud to announce a new effort to make the path to journalism entrepreneurship easier: The Tiny News Collective, a new partnership providing the tools, resources and commonwealth of knowledge to help people build sustainable news organizations that reflect and serve their communities.

The project is a collaboration between News Catalyst and LION Publishers, along with a group of industry leaders and partners. The Collective isn’t trying to “save” local journalism as we know it. We are empowering people to build something new and better: a true, ground-up ecosystem of diverse, locally focused newsrooms that are from and for local communities.

Our mission is to help bring equity into the news and information ecosystem by democratizing the process of starting sustainable local news businesses and supporting people who have been historically excluded from media and media ownership.

We will do this at scale: Our goal is to nurture and grow 500 sustainable local news organizations over the next three years, at least half of them based in communities that are unserved or underserved, run by founders who have historically been shut out.

“We’re excited to provide access to long-sought support for tiny news organizations as they navigate the process of getting started,” said André Natta, Tiny News Collective board chair.

“It’s equally important to me to be able to provide a platform for presently underrepresented communities, large and small, and for those founders to have a space to speak to each other as they move forward,” he said.

Launching a news organization is time-consuming, complicated, expensive — and risky. The vast majority of news startups don’t begin with deep-pocketed investors and splashy coverage in industry press. Most are launched by one or two founders who are passionate about news and information and motivated to serve their communities, but with no outside help and limited resources.

Many of these tiny news sites fail not because the founders weren’t passionate or hard-working, but because any small mistake at an early stage can be fatal. This is why media ownership is inaccessible to so many, and why we have built The Tiny News Collective to give founders the best possible chance to succeed.

Kara Meyberg Guzman, one of our board members, co-founded Santa Cruz Local, a local news outlet that serves Santa Cruz County, Calif., in 2019.

“It’s really hard to launch and build a financially sustainable news organization, let alone as a millennial woman of color. We don’t have equal access to institutional funding. So we had to bootstrap. We built this company from the ground up,” she said.

“All around the country there’s entrepreneurs like me. I joined the board of the Tiny News Collective because I want to make it easier for others like me — women, people of color, young people, and those with nontraditional journalism backgrounds — to enter this industry and build successful companies,” she said.

By bringing together our unique support structure, suite of services and technology platform, we will dramatically lower the cost, complexity and time required to start a local newsroom and achieve sustainability. We can spin up newsrooms in a matter of days, and spin off sustainable newsrooms just as easily when they are ready to go independent.

A Unique Structure

Our structure — essentially a form of fiscal sponsorship — allows us to efficiently share services across our newsrooms, thus dramatically lowering costs in order to provide resources like libel insurance, legal assistance, accounting, operations support and access to a community of peers through LION Publishers.

Unrivaled Support

Our team, partners and advisors include some of the best in the business. We have expertise in entrepreneurship, marketing, analytics, local news, technology, management, accounting, product and First Amendment law. Our founders will have access to expertise that rivals the largest global news organizations.

Unparalleled Technology

By leveraging developments in open source software and serverless cloud infrastructure, we built a super scalable publishing platform that costs pennies compared to the alternatives. All of the tooling is pre-configured and optimized for a local news site tuned to a reader-revenue-focused business model.

Our pricing model is still being finalized, but The Collective will be able to offer the platform, training, legal assistance, back-office services and everything else for around $100 per month — a fraction of what it would cost on the open market. LION membership is included in the price, giving founders access to additional training and an entire community to learn from.

Applications for our first group of founders will open early 2021, but from Tuesday forward those who are interested can sign up at our website: tinynewsco.org. Anyone who is committed to begin the entrepreneurial journey in the news industry and is passionate about their community is an outstanding candidate for The Collective.

News Catalyst, based at Temple University and supported by the Knight-Lenfest Local News Transformation Fund, is leading product and technology. LION Publishers, an association serving aspiring and existing independent news entrepreneurs, is developing the training, onboarding and community elements of the project in partnership with the Google News Initiative.

Alley Interactive contributed design work to the project. And we are working closely with Newspack, a project of WordPress.com and the Google News Initiative, to ensure that when one of our newsrooms is ready to move to their platform, the migration will be seamless.

All of our legal work has been contributed by Alexander Papachristou at Lawyers for Reporters and Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP.

At The Tiny News Collective, we help communities build newsrooms.

We provide the tools, resources and commonwealth of knowledge to help people build sustainable news organizations that reflect and serve their communities.

We support voices historically excluded from media and media ownership.

We believe a world where everyone can participate in creating relevant, accurate and culturally conscious local news and information is one where everyone can more fully engage in civic life, make more informed decisions, and better understand the world around them.

Introducing The Tiny News Collective was originally published in News Catalyst on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Circumstances for many news organizations have been difficult since long before the current crisis. Whether it’s a lack of capacity or support, newsrooms have been struggling with designing and managing effective product processes that can bolster their work and better serve their audiences.

News Catalyst was created to help news organizations through experimentation around tools, technology, collaboration and product development. To that end, we’re launching a new partnership program to provide assistance to organizations.

What we’re looking for are partner news organizations interested in collaborating to solve a challenge they are facing in their organization.

What we hope to accomplish is helping our partners find useful solutions to their problems and to share what we learn so that other newsrooms can build upon those approaches.

What we have to offer is our time and expertise across technology, workflow, product and the news industry.

“More than ever, we believe that teaming up to tackle big problems is how we build a new future for journalism.” — Aron Pilhofer, Director.

“Our future audiences consume news online, and you need to be there to meet them. The technology to succeed digitally can be daunting and expensive, but we can help you find and build cost-effective solutions to building a sustainable digital business.” — Tyler Fisher, Deputy Director, Technology.

“There is an almost endless variety of products and services potentially useful when writing, presenting and distributing stories. We can help streamline the discovery process while offering frictionless access as part of your organization’s informed approach to reporting.” — Jacqui Lough, Developer.

“In the busy-ness of a newsroom, it’s easy to neglect the behind-the-scenes infrastructure that can make the work of journalism easier, more efficient, and better supported. Our team of planners and builders is here to help.” — Jessica Morrison, Product Lead.

“With resources stretched, it’s important for us to be thoughtful about creating processes that help teams be engaged and effective. We can help you figure out what does and doesn’t work for your organization and collaborate to come up with workflows that empower your team.” — Heather Bryant, Deputy Director, Product.

There are always going to be new challenges that stress the capacity and test the adaptability of news organizations but together we can build the systems and culture to meet those challenges head on.

You can see more about the partnerships and how to share your idea here: News Catalyst Product Partnerships.

News Catalyst helps news organizations transform themselves into sustainable digital businesses.

We accomplish this by providing tools, fostering collaboration, and promoting experimentation within the news industry.

Our focus is in areas which news organizations have traditionally under-invested, like product development, data, analytics, digital storytelling, mobile and engagement. Where there are gaps in capability, News Catalyst fills them by providing tools, technology, training, hands-on support and expertise.

Tackling news challenges together was originally published in News Catalyst on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Jacqui Lough will join News Catalyst as our developer. Jacqui is one of the most accomplished and successful developers in the news industry, and we’re honored that she accepted the offer to join our team.

At News Catalyst, Jacqui will focus on our most important technological efforts. This includes PressPass, our single sign-on suite for news tools, and other technology-focused initiatives that News Catalyst will undertake in the coming year. We see part of our mission as getting the right tools and technology into the hands of news organizations. Jacqui will be vital to that effort.

Before joining News Catalyst, Jacqui was the head of interactive news for Condé Nast, focused on a dozen international Vogue markets. She previously worked at the BBC and the New York Times, focusing on interactive news and data journalism. Prior to her work in media, Jacqui helped develop Friendster. Recently, Jacqui moved to Australia, where she will continue to work.

So if you’re keeping score, Jacqui has worked for the most successful news organizations in the world and helped develop a foundational social network that changed the way we used the internet. No big deal.

Please join me in welcoming Jacqui to the News Catalyst team.

Jacqui Lough joins News Catalyst team was originally published in News Catalyst on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Heather Bryant will take on the position of deputy director, product. For this role, I was looking for someone with a sharp product focus, someone who is creative and entrepreneurial — oh, and someone who understands the challenges facing local news enterprises. I couldn’t imagine a better fit than Heather.

Heather popped on my radar while she was on her JSK Fellowship in 2016-17. Her focus was on ways to empower collaborative journalism, particularly at the local level. Four-ish years ago, collaboration was still viewed by many as a nice to have. Today we know it is more of an existential question as local news organizations are forced to do more with less.

Heather is founder and director (and lead developer) of Project Facet, a truly visionary platform designed to reduce the friction of collaborative journalism projects. Heather and I were already talking about the many ways Project Facet and News Catalyst could work together, so much more to come in this space.

Finally, Heather has a deep understanding of the challenges local news organizations face. Prior to her fellowship, Heather was hired at KTOO in the newly created role of new media producer, where, in addition to her digital duties, she did some reporting and photography. She was promoted to the editorial leadership team as digital editor, taking on additional responsibilities assigning and editing stories.

As I said, I couldn’t imagine a better fit for the role.

Tyler Fisher technically joined News Catalyst a year ago as deputy director, technology. But because we were in stealth mode, he never did get a full announcement. So let me try to rectify that right now.

Tyler comes to us from Politico, where he was senior apps developer. But I first met Tyler in 2014 while he was an intern on Brian Boyer’s supremely talented Visuals team at National Public Radio, where he ended up working full-time as a news apps developer.

Brian had already mentioned Tyler to me many times, which piqued my interest. Brian isn’t easy to impress.

I was visiting the team before heading to the Guardian in London to build a visuals desk of my own. Most newsrooms (then and now, sadly) see visuals as a nice-to-have, as ornaments to dress up the “real” journalism — which is to say words.

Over lunch with Brian and his team, Tyler and I talked about how to make visuals core, how to measure the impact of visual journalism, and some of the experiments the team was undertaking around impact. This was not just a brilliant technologist, but someone who thought deeply about the more fundamental problems facing the industry. And, needless to say, Tyler was clearly someone I needed to keep on the radar in case an opportunity opened up in the future.

Lucky for me, it did. Tyler was literally my first call for the deputy director, technology, role and I couldn’t be more delighted he agreed to take this challenge on.

And finally, Jessica Morrison joins us as product lead from the American Chemical Society, where she is senior product manager for Chemical and Engineering News. She will be splitting her time between C&EN and News Catalyst.

I got to know Jessica at last year’s SRCCON in Minneapolis, where she and C&EN Editorial Director, Amanda Yarnell, led a mind-blowingly great workshop on building a functional product process and mindset in even the smallest news organizations. The session was inspired by Jessica’s own journey building a highly functional product practice at C&EN over the past 18 months.

As we talked, it was pretty obvious that Jessica was not only spooky smart and brilliantly talented, she has a lot to contribute to the core problems News Catalyst was created to address in local news — particularly in the area of training and organizational development. Thankfully, Amanda agreed and was willing to arrange for Jessica to work with us half-time.

Jessica’s initial focus will be developing our pilot Product Immersion for Small Newsrooms training course with the Newmark School and Google. Over time, we will be drawing more of her experience and expertise to help newsrooms of all sizes become more product focused.

Please join me in welcoming all three to the News Catalyst team.

Heather Bryant, Tyler Fisher, Jessica Morrison join News Catalyst team was originally published in News Catalyst on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.