Designing for Journalists
On March 13th, the 2017 Social Journalism cohort led the Innovation Challenge at CMA’s Spring National College Media Convention. The CMA convention gathers college media makers from all over the world to midtown Manhattan for a series of workshops and events.
Powered by donuts courtesy of Carrie Brown we led an intimate design thinking training session with a group of students and a professor hailing from several universities from across the US. I left the session feeling invigorated and inspired. Here’s why:
Design thinking is a practice with a philosophy. Products and services work best when the needs (emotional, practical, physical, financial, etc.) of the users are taken into account before, during and after release.
Our task on Monday was to teach the principles of design thinking as it relates to journalism. Our first question for the participants : Who is your audience?
Design, for the students in our workshop, traditionally came up when thinking about page layout for websites and physical papers. How can the photos we display capture the attention of a group of busy students. How can our website make it easy for people in the community to find out about events happening on campus.
During this session we split the students up into groups and had them practice the steps of design thinking by creating a media project to suit the needs of their partner. Our hope was to train these students so they could bring back the skills of design thinking to their campus media organizations.
Ty Sokalski, from Oregon State University was thrilled with the results.
I won’t have to worry about whether people will like what I make, now I can make something I know they will like!”
News organizations with smaller budgets, like these college media organizations, would be served well by focusing their resources on services that they know will be useful for their communities. Using the skills of design thinking helps you hone your focus and increase your efficiency.
Communities have distinct needs. Two days earlier I attended a photoshop training organized by CUNY’s Center for Community and Ethnic Media. While the attendees, reporters and editors representing media outlets from all across New York, appreciated to learn some of the technical photo editing skills, the conversation frequently returned back to questions about the ethics of editing photos for news publication. CCEM can now take that feedback and plan new workshops to address journalistic ethics for community and ethnic news producers.
Empathy helps you identify the needs of your community. Design thinking helps create useful products and services to serve those needs.
