How studying media innovation prepared us to launch a content startup
We created The Host HQ to see if a new publication could be built through user-centered design. We learned a lot.
As I headed into my final quarter at Medill’s media innovation and entrepreneurship (MIE) program last spring, I looked back on the broad lessons we’d learned through diverse projects. With different teams, I had worked on a service to help people find urban rental units; built out a functional website for gamified blockchain educational courses; and designed concepts for residents to get to know their neighbors.
On my own, I researched and developed a business plan for Prodos, an information solution for business leaders to understand and adopt enterprise blockchain. In NUvention Web+Media, a six-month interdisciplinary capstone project, my team was halfway through developing a service that helps cannabis home growers maintain their crops.
The crash courses were immensely valuable, yet something was missing. I recalled the harsh realities of graduating in the U.S. media capital of New York during the 2009 recession, when legacy outlets were hemorrhaging. Since then, I have fallen short multiple times in running sustainable publications. I’ve watched friends get laid off as the New York Daily News, Buzzfeed and Mashable downsized, and scores of others gave up on journalism altogether as the job market dried up. If they failed, and I failed, was there any right answer about how to keep journalism sustainable? I took that bet when I enrolled at Medill to learn the fundamentals of media entrepreneurship. By my final term, I was still unsure of the answer.
A handful of my classmates felt similarly. For all our lessons in user-centered design and product development, we did not know how they would apply to journalism. In fairness, there is only so much one can learn in a year. But we were motivated to explore an answer.
Four media innovation students and three business reporting students banded together in spring 2019 to form an independent study course we called Innovation in Content Publishing. It was our grand experiment to prove ourselves, to see if all the innovative frameworks we learned could solve the problems in our industry. Over the 10-week course, we developed The Host HQ, an information service and product listings platform for Airbnb hosts of Chicago. You can read in-depth about our setup here.
Much of our coursework at Medill informed how we approached ideation and development of The Host HQ. We also faced the reality that a classroom can’t teach us everything, and set off to learn by doing. Here’s how we applied what we learned to develop a journalistic solution for our audience.
Users first
The media industry still grapples with balancing an editor’s intuition and the audience’s interests. While traditional media had little information about what readers actually wanted to know, we now have many ways to understand how people consume information.
Our first crash course on flipping the traditional framework on its head was Frameworks for Modern Journalism, where we studied the evolution of media innovation from the days of the Hearst-Pulitzer newspaper wars to publishers’ forced dependency on Facebook. In this first-quarter course for all Medill students, we worked on group projects to develop the concept for an information solution that would address a small target audience’s needs.
In our second quarter in San Francisco, a course on Design Thinking taught us a new, sometimes uncomfortable way of understanding users’ needs and conjuring up unconventional ways to solve them.
We carried those lessons back to our final two quarters in Evanston, where we worked on product development projects in our NUvention Web+Media and Local News Design classes.
To make the most of our time, we decided on our target audience before we began the independent study course. We were intrigued by the emergent sharing economy and the tensions arising among companies, governments and workers. We decided to focus on the niche of Airbnb hosts in Chicago, intending to build a model that could scale.
We were warned that content is not always the right solution in a purely user-centric scenario. In journalism, we must be cognizant of whether we are trying to solve problems for our users or for our industry. It was our job to determine which compromises to make.
For The Host HQ, we consciously entered the project with that constraint. Innovative product design depends on an intersection of desirability, feasibility and viability, with the first being the most important. As a team of journalists seeking an answer for sustainable media, we went to war with the army we had, and sought to develop a content-based solution for our target audience.
Concept validation
After learning about users’ needs, the next step in product concept development is to come up with far-fetched ideas to address them. Our Design Thinking course sent us down a Post-it Note-fueled rabbit hole of brainstorming techniques, from rapid-fire idea dumps to “Things That Would Get You Fired.” Some ideas were so crazy they just might work; others were simply crazy.
We had learned that the keys to making this type of ideation work are to be open-minded and to refrain from rejecting any ideas out of hand. Then, after synthesizing and rationalizing them, we could flesh out a few and bring them back to users for initial feedback.
At The Host HQ, we identified three key pain points for our users: confusion over local legislative and tax issues, questions around optimal pricing, and being part of the community. As we were taught in our design-thinking course, we fleshed out those concepts and got feedback. We were right about a few things and wrong about others, and used that information to form our final prototype. Here’s how we did it.
Building trust with our early users — who were also our article subjects — was also crucial for getting honest feedback through our many stages of product development.
Product development
Only one member of our team had been in a product development environment before. (Fortunately, she was the team developer.) But our fundamental courses Foundations of Interactive Journalism and Mobile Web Development taught us the basics of web design. All Medill media innovation students come away with knowledge of HTML/CSS, responsive design and news aesthetics, as well as how to work with Github, Heroku, Balsamiq and Invision to collaborate on interactive website wireframes and page development. Further coursework in Local News Design and the Knight Lab Studio class also went into wireframing with tools like Adobe XD.
For the sake of expediency, we opted for Wordpress themes to build The Host HQ. But our understanding of fundamental user experience design helped us decide our priorities for feature development.
Under our time constraints, the lesson of compromise was one we learned on our own. We had several ideas for engaging our users, but many fell through the cracks as we had to decide which functions were the most important in fleshing out and testing our prototype. This is often measured by impact versus effort, a matrix I learned at my San Francisco internship at Meedan.
Audience development and engagement
As I mentioned, today’s media outlets have a trove of tools on hand to understand how people consume information. The third-quarter course Audience Development and Analytics taught us practical tricks and insights about Google Analytics, newsletter management, webpage categories, HTML tags and search engine optimization. (Some of those tricks I share here.)
At The Host HQ, those tools came in handy for setting up articles to have their best shot in search results and social media feeds. We managed to reach the front page of Google searches for some terms and gleaned a few insights on what worked well on Facebook.
NUvention also introduced us to the concept of A/B testing on social media advertising, which we explored at The Host HQ.
Because our product was so new, our reach was limited — and so was our data. It was difficult to make conclusive insights on what types of content were most successful. Moreover, the concept of “content strategy” has overtaken “editorial direction” in today’s digital newsroom vernacular, and it was unclear based on our coursework how to create the most effective content. That is when we relied on my editorial experience and tips from our editorial adviser Karen Springen for direction.
Learning by doing, our audience development lead and content team also developed funnel strategies and milestones for how we would categorize our users and tailor content for them going forward.
Business modeling
We were warned in Frameworks for Modern Journalism of the failures of traditional advertising models, and the Business of Innovation course in San Francisco gave us a lightning-speed overview of how to put together a business plan, from a product development timeline to a P&L and cap statement. Later, NUvention Web+Media required the incubated projects to determine their market size to develop investor-ready pricing and revenue models.
For a content-based product, only a handful of revenue models have proven successful. We decided that advertising and branded content were the best ways to monetize The Host HQ.
We also developed HQ Listings to satisfy users’ need for Airbnb-specific product recommendations, through which we surmised we could highlight products as advertising or generate affiliate leads for revenue. Our user feedback to the listings product was lukewarm.
While we failed to find a sustainable business model for this niche audience by the time we wrapped up the course, that doesn’t mean there isn’t one. Several data-driven products such as Airdna and Wheelhouse serve vacation rental hosts and property managers and earn significant subscription and commission rates.
If our mission was truly to deliver objective, journalistic content to hosts, it appeared we would have to develop content as marketing for a more monetizable core product. In such a short period, that is not something we were able to validate.
Teamwork
One aspect I valued at Medill was the abundance of group projects, which I believe lead to increased creativity and accountability. These collaborative environments contrast with the binary editor-reporter relationship that many journalists experience.
That is what makes the startup process more exciting. But it also comes with growing pains. In any small, high-performing team, trust is key, be it at a print magazine or a startup. In the startup scenario where each member has their own specialty, trust and accountability fuel each other. When it works, people step up to the plate to prevent letting down the rest of the team. When it doesn’t, things go off the rails.
A flattened hierarchy gives everyone a voice at the table, but disagreements — be it strategy or even logistical — may be harder to resolve. A single person’s negativity, bad day or lack of full effort can sap the productivity and enthusiasm from the whole team. As a former magazine editor and newspaper reporter, I worked with hierarchies where roles were clear and respected. In a startup environment, I had to let go of many traditional ways of operating and allow the team to find its own equilibrium. Our media innovation classes gave us several opportunities to adapt to this work style before we set off on The Host HQ.
So, can journalism be sustainable?
The Host HQ fell short of becoming the next big moneymaker in media, but I have not lost hope. Our lessons at Medill didn’t give us answers to the news business’ woes, but rather frameworks to find our own solutions as the media industry evolves.
Some principles remain clear: build a product that users need, and make it worth paying for. In the B2B environment, content must be so specialized and important to a company’s success that businesses are willing to pay. For B2C media, outlets depend on subscriptions or advertising, both of which require engaging content to lure large numbers of users. While some outlets survive with government funding or nonprofit fundraising, they must incessantly prove the execution of their mission is worth the cost.
No media company is safe. Niche outlets and local news in particular struggle to weather the changing market landscape. I don’t know if there’s an answer for them, but we must continue to challenge ourselves to think differently about content if we should ever find the solution.
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