Startup story part 2: A future for news
In part one (4 min read) we spoke about the news problem space and the issues we see in the emergent trends of news consumption. In this post, we’ll describe our future vision for the news and the first steps we’re taking towards it.
20/20
Based on the research in part one, we were able to articulate a vision of a future to help us shape some of our early decisions and make sure we all agreed on what we wanted to achieve.
Our vision: Where younger generations engage with meaningful news and current events to promote and enrich civic engagement to higher levels than ever before.
So where do we start? Depending on which business expert you ask, establishing a vision is either critical or useless at this stage. For us, it meant agreeing a direction of travel, so we could take our first steps.
Early in this project — as with all startups — we knew having a good picture of people’s existing behaviours would be important for informing product development.
We learned that younger people (18–24) generally have much ‘fresher’ habits when it comes to consuming news and that they also tend to be heavily influenced by the way they use social media, validating our earlier research.
We also found some interesting — if conflicting — insights about people both being overwhelmed by the vast amount of news and having feelings of FOMO. How might a news service be mindful of both keeping people up to date on important events, while being careful not to overwhelm them with too much?
Introducing: The Dot
To continue our learning process, we have built a news service to use as a base to test editorial and product ideas over the coming weeks and months.
The Dot is our early access release of a minimal UK headline news app. On our homepage, we ask the question ‘when did you last catch yourself mindlessly scrolling through a newsfeed?’. The Dot is a response to this feeling, it’s a short digest giving you a sense of completeness rather than one of being overwhelmed by a stream of consciousness from every journalist on the planet.
If you’re an iOS user, you can install a beta version here.
To seriously address the disconnect between news providers and the generations of younger people growing up with an increasingly sceptical view of the media we knew we needed to think big.
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
― Søren Kierkegaard
Those who know me can attest, invoking quotes of famous people is not really my vibe, but this quote succinctly summarises our approach to reimagining the news.
What happened?
In the context of hard news, how valuable someone finds a short daily news update depends primarily on interest and knowledge of the stories covered.
We think ‘interest’ follows ‘knowledge of context’, and understanding the context of individual news stories on a daily basis is, well, difficult. It’s certainly harder for some than others. Both ‘why should I care?’ and ‘it’s really difficult to understand’ are huge barriers.
This is a problem for news publishing, as we know people are consuming news while doing other things, and in an environment where competition for attention is fierce, we think the inaccessibility of hard news leads to an increase in superficial relationships with news publishers.
We want to provide relevant context as a backdrop for reporting headline news.
What happens next?
In his book, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, Anders Ericsson explains the power of mental representations:
The key benefit of mental representations lies in how they help us deal with information: understanding and interpreting it, holding it in memory, organizing it, analyzing it, and making decisions with it.
There is something about the way our brains process and hold information that we think can help people understand a snapshot of current events better; helping with comprehension and retention of information as news stories develop over time.
This is with the goal of providing people with a mental representation of where things are going to bring a sense of storytelling to the news.
We’re taking a small step in this direction with the introduction of questions as part of news coverage, and there’s more to come from us in this space in the coming weeks.
People can contribute via a small interaction once per story and hopefully build a more complete picture of current events.
Got a question or interested in getting involved in some way?
You can find me as @pace on Twitter with open DMs 👋
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