How a new Knight Lab class seeks to solve problems in local news
Design for Local News students are prototyping new products that address people’s needs for local information
The dire state of local news is often called a threat to democracy as residents face a shortage of information to hold institutions accountable and make the right choices. Yet a viable future for local media remains elusive.
Design for Local News, a new class taught in Northwestern University’s Knight Lab, challenges students to come up with creative ways to address the information needs of local communities. It’s part of the Medill Local News Initiative. Master’s students from Medill (most from the Media Innovation & Entrepreneurship Specialization) and Northwestern’s Engineering Design Innovation program are spending six months researching and prototyping media product concepts in the local space.
While the news initiative has partnered with three local news companies (the Chicago Tribune, Indianapolis Star and San Francisco Chronicle), the outcomes of the Design for Local News class might not be what local news outlets are hoping for. For real structure change in local news to happen, bottom-up change is required, said Zach Wise, who co-teaches this year’s inaugural yearlong course with Susan Curtis, adjunct lecturer for Northwestern’s Segal Design Institute, and support from the Knight Lab staff.
“There’s a saying in design that design doesn’t warrant change unless the fundamental architecture underneath it changes. Otherwise it’s putting a different wallpaper up,” Wise said. But much of the innovation in the industry is more wallpaper than reform. “Starting from the bottom up is the approach that leads to structural change in a time that we desperately need it.”
Wise hopes exposing journalism students to the human-centered design process, which drills down to understand the root of problems, helps them understand people’s needs from a different angle, which he says opens up the potential to be truly innovative.
From an educational standpoint, Design for Local News seeks to give students a broader understanding of the problems in local news and a process for uncovering them. For Medill MIE students, this year’s course is one of two options for a capstone master’s project (along with NUvention Web+Media). Over winter and spring quarters, the students apply a “design thinking” approach to product development — a process that is widely practiced yet not widely embraced in media and journalism, Wise said.
A product idea developed in the class will likely “cause an identity crisis with news organizations,” Wise said. “It’s probably going to produce something that looks very foreign and unconventional.”
Senior associate dean Tim Franklin, who oversees the Medill Local News Initiative, says the Design for Local News projects demonstrate a creative energy that can help local news providers better address citizen engagement.
“One of the more important elements to any local news organization is to connect community. Now we have vastly more ways to do that. I like the ingenuity behind some of these ideas and their ability to use new technologies to connect each other,” he says.
“At the root of what a local news organization should be, it should be a connector and an engine. [The class] does both of these.”
In the Winter 2019 quarter, five MIE students were part of the class. Here are the three projects they presented at the class’s final session in the winter quarter:
Product name: Atlas
MIE team members: Ally Holterman, Danny Hwang
What’s the problem that your product addresses?
Danny: We have this subset of people who are interested in and are more likely to engage in local news events. The problem is that local newsrooms lack resources. So these more engaged people — we call them learners — Google issues they want to learn more about and end up at primary sources like government websites. These government websites are very difficult to navigate, and information lacks context. People look up meeting transcripts, meeting agendas and summaries, and there are none of those.
Atlas tries to bridge that knowledge gap between the engaged local news consumer and the primary source of local news.
How would it work?
Ally: Atlas is a transcription service powered by AI that transcribes whatever is said in local meetings. It’s presented in a platform where users can sort through and highlight as they see fit.
Danny: The other part of the product is that this transcript of meeting agendas and meeting summaries is going to be in searchable databases, so people who are interested in any topic can log in to our platform and use it like one would use Google Scholar.
How did you decide to address this particular problem?
Danny: Based on our user interviews, we found that there are things that people want learn more about. People knew a meeting was happening but they couldn’t make it. We saw that need and that it wasn’t being filled by actual participants at local meetings.
Do you envision an ideal target user? Who would this product be perfect for?
Ally: I was thinking the whole time that it would be perfect for Hillsborough, my hometown suburb of San Francisco. It’s small, they don’t have a local newspaper, and most info such as school board meetings and budgets is found out through gossip.
When you look at the neighborhood demographics, they’re working, they have kids, and people want to know about board meetings. In that sense, I think it would be the perfect setting. It would also work well in a metropolitan setting, but the difference is there are currently more tools in metropolitan settings.
How did you use the lessons from the design thinking course in our San Francisco quarter?
Ally: The San Francisco course talked about checking your own assumptions and trying to figure out what people are doing versus saying, or a combination of the two. It really helps with solving problems that are there versus problems that you think are there.
Danny: One of the hardest things in developing this product was we kept straying away from users’ needs because we saw potential benefits for other groups involved in this picture, such as meeting organizers or local news. But our design thinking class helped us focus explicitly on the news consumer and keep us on track to really make the product fit the needs of one group.
What are the key challenges going forward with this project?
Danny: One of our main assumptions is that the technology will be there, but we haven’t really explored that yet. We also haven’t been to meetings to see what that’s like, and need to work out logistics such as who would be turning on the app at these meetings.
We’re still trying to see if this is something that people will need.
Product name: Buoyant
MIE team member: Louis Oh
What’s the problem that your product addresses?
Louis: We were thinking, are we focusing too much on how to make newsrooms survive, and not thinking about why they’re trying to survive? At the end of the day, it’s about making sure people are informed at the local level. The way we’re making them do that is to do it themselves.
This is based on an insight we found: A lot of people might find big news sources as untrustworthy, but they tend to trust people around them — people they know or can recognize as part of their community. There are already Facebook community groups and Nextdoor, but there can be a lot of clutter for people to dig through.
Buoyant lets communities crowdsource not only information but also the editorial process. Like in Reddit, where you upvote or downvote, users can float or sink the information. This allows for stories that are not necessarily newsworthy — such as an obstruction on our street to a local school fundraiser or subway station that’s closed. That’s something the Chicago Tribune might not care about, but people do.
It allows people to inform each other and to vote on whether or not more people should know about it. If the information is wrong or stupid, people can decide for themselves.
Who would be your ideal user?
Louis: Sometimes it’s tough to keep a blog going into your 60s and 70s. It can be tough to maintain a forum when it’s reached capacity and there are hundreds of people using it on a daily basis.
We would target communities that already have something similar in place and give them something more polished and that accommodates those needs without burdening one person too heavily.
How did you get interested in tackling this problem?
Louis: We started off thinking about local news and trying to solve problems for it. We took a deconstructionist approach for what ‘local’ and ‘news’ was. The objective, in the end, is to inform.
A lot of our ideas are essentially based [on the finding that] residents get local newsletters but they’re not good quality or they don’t find them good enough to trust, or it’s national news that has too much noise in it, or regional papers that they don’t feel they want to pay for. They want information, but nothing really suffices for people’s purposes.
What useful feedback have you received?
Louis: We were thinking about it already, but geographic or political distinctions are not always the most suitable. Even on a hyperlocal level like your apartment building, you don’t really know everyone in that building and might not always feel safe with that group.
Geographic level is still important because people need to vote. But what about when you’re a minority or your first language isn’t English, and you have another group or community that you want to connect with or need to raise a different type of issue? That could be on an ethnic or race level, but it could also mean cyclists or another hobby. Maybe certain verticals are one way we can segment or allow people to segment their communities.
How did you use the lessons from the design thinking course in our San Francisco quarter?
Louis: Being prepared and knowing what everything is made it easier to jump straight into it. It’s not as odd to put random ideas on to Post-it notes and throw them on a board.
Is there any way the design thinking process did not serve you well?
Louis: One issue we had was sampling. We didn’t initially know who we’d end up talking to but expected a wider audience. We ended up getting a group centralized around a certain psychographic and demographic.
We started a little broad, and honing in on a specific aspect or side of the audience might have helped us. For the design process, it’s OK to explore and be a little lost, but we did a lot of blind [wandering] in the dark.
What are the key challenges going forward with this project?
Louis: What can we do in a 7–8 week period. With our idea, which some people think there’s promise in, how much we can actually execute in the scope of our class is a concern.
It’s nice to think about in theory, but it’s a whole other issue to launch a complex site structure. We’ve gotten to suspend practical considerations for 10 weeks, but those practical considerations may start to factor in.
Product name: Cause/Connect
MIE team members: Melissa Hovanes, Isabel Miller-Bottome
What’s the problem that your product addresses?
Isabel: We found that a local news audience characteristic was people who are active in their community and interested in organizing. Many of these organizers in different communities were dealing with similar problems but affecting their community in different ways.
Melissa: We set out to help connect local issues and contextualize them on a national scale. Cause/Connect seeks to connect local organizers to other organizers throughout the country based on areas of interest. A lot of times these people are connected regionally or locally, but they don’t speak with people around the country quite as much.
How would it work?
Melissa: It works by leveraging Facebook Groups API as well as natural language processing and machine learning to better connect organizers, who are seeking answers to their pressing organizing needs, to other organizers who are already having discussions on Facebook about similar areas of interest.
Isabel: If you have a question, you’re starting a new initiative or you have an issue in your community, you can type it in and the platform will automatically match you with similar organizers in different communities, and have them answer your question for you or facilitate starting the conversation.
How did you get interested in tackling this problem?
Isabel: We talked to people who were very engaged in national news but not local news, but cared about local issues, which we thought was an interesting insight. We went through different brainstorming activities like rapid fire and constraint exercises and arrived at this through a lot of iterations.
How did our design thinking course help you in this process?
Melissa: It was a good introduction to the philosophy around design thinking. This round of design thinking was quite a messy process, but the San Francisco course prepared me to be more comfortable with that messy front end of the design research process.
What were some caveats of using the design thinking process?
Melissa: The problem we set out to solve was quite large, so it was difficult to synthesize the findings from the user interviews into an actionable problem.
Does this product help solve the local news problem, even if not in the traditional sense?
Isabel: We hope it’ll connect a certain segment of people who care about local issues. If we can find this niche community that cares about local news and solve their problems, that would be useful for local news organizations, but we’re still figuring out how.
How has this exercise filled out your MIE experience?
Isabel: It’s put the pieces together in that we’ve learned about the struggles facing a lot of media companies today and we’ve learned a lot of tools to build new products.
We’re actually thinking about how to build solutions for local news organizations. You have to know about news and journalism and how to build audience-based solutions, which I think is really important for when we leave this program.
What are the key challenges going forward with this project?
Isabel: Fleshing out the features and narrowing down the problem it solves and the user it solves for. Figuring out the audience size, the market size, and if there’s a possibility of a revenue model.
Melissa: We received a lot of great feedback during the science fair presentations at the end of the quarter. Our challenge now is to synthesize that and go back to the drawing board to refine the features and better understand our user in general.
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