What’s Next for Mobile Innovation in News? Spurring a New Wave of Collaboration and User-Centered Design.
An overview of the presentations, panels, Q&As and discussions from the Guardian Mobile Innovation Lab’s closing event.
A big part of the Mobile Innovation Lab’s mission has been to be open about its processes and share what it has learned in the course of its experimentation. As we wrap up two years of work, we still have a lot to share about the results of our final experiments, about where we see big opportunities to better serve mobile audiences and the importance of user-centered design, effective measurement and multidisciplinary work in our innovation projects.
We shared much of what we’ve learned during a day of discussion in New York on March 26. Over the course of the day, members of the lab team and representatives from a broad cross-section of newsrooms discussed the many opportunities — often unknown or unexplored — that mobile offers to create highly relevant news experiences that encourage loyalty among users and open up new possibilities for growth. We also discussed the challenges often associated with innovation work and collaborating across disciplines.
We are now sharing slides and transcripts from the day, below, in the hopes they can be useful to a broader constituency of editors, reporters, product managers, technologists, designers, and others working to bring news into the future. But first…
Why do we think innovation on mobile is still important?
Relationships with readers are essential to the future of media, yet getting the news to them has never been more challenging. Platforms exert outsized influence, making it critical for news outlets to find innovative ways to engage audiences, without intermediaries.
The Lab has found that audiences are eager to consume news in new formats that speak to them in the language of mobile — with notifications, creative use of mobile signals like location data, alternative audio formats, new live coverage layouts and alternative formats for evolving stories. While we have done a lot of work in these areas, we’ve also barely scratched the surface. The opportunities for organizations to drive loyalty and even monetization with useful and relevant news experiences still feels under explored, and under discussed. We hope our event and these notes will help spur on those working within their organizations to take better advantage of these opportunities.
And a few quick ‘thank you’s
Thank you to Erik Westra, our incredible event planner, Amanda Lundberg, our diligent transcriber, and to all of our wonderful speakers, moderators and panelists.
Thanks also to the Knight Foundation and our supporters and collaborators within the Guardian, without whom we would not have had this open runway to test and learn with real audiences. We’ll always be grateful for the opportunity we have had to contribute to the future of our industry in this unique way.
Thank you, too, for reading and considering our work in these past two years. We hope it has been useful and interesting!
Happy building,
— Sarah, Sasha and the lab
*Note: We still have a few posts about our experiments and methodologies in the hopper, including a post with direct access to all of the re-usable code built by the lab’s incredibly talented engineers, Alastair Coote and Connor Jennings. We’ll publish these in the coming weeks. Stay tuned.
Event Overview
Session 1 — Setting the Stage: Why a Mobile Innovation Lab? Aron Pilhofer, James B. Steele Chair in Journalism Innovation at Temple University
Session 2— What does innovation mean to the Mobile Innovation Lab? Presentation by Sarah Schmalbach and Sasha Koren
View slides here | Read the full transcript.
Session 3 — 2+ years later: A Conversation About the Lab’s Work and Mission. Aron Pilhofer interviews Sarah Schmalbach and Sasha Koren
Session 4— Panel: How Mobile Innovation is Taking Root in Other Newsrooms. Moderator: Shazna Nessa, Deputy Managing Editor, Global Head of Visuals, The Wall Street Journal.
Panelists: Maria Sanchez Diez , Editor, Emerging News Products, Univision Noticias | Adam Levy, Senior Product Manager, The Washington Post |Sam Jacoby, Developer, Interactive News Team, The New York Times |Tiffany Campbell, Executive Editor, Digital, WBUR.
Transcript coming.
Session 5 — Lab ‘Lightning’ Talks: Members of Mobile Lab Team on Their Projects and Methods.
Presentations by: Alastair Coote, Developer | Madeline Welsh, Associate Editor, and Jana Kasperkevic, Guardian US Business Reporter | Lynette Chen, Senior Analytics Consultant, MaassMedia | Dylan Greif, Product Designer | Mazin Sidahmed, Reporter, and Sam Morris, Guardian US Head of Design
All slides are below | Read the full transcript.
Madeline Welsh and Jana Kasperkevic, The Jobs Report: A story about collaboration
Lynette Chen, Analyzing the Success of Mobile Innovation Projects
Mazin Sidahmed and Sam Morris, Different approaches to Smarticles
Session 6— Q&A with Zach Brand: Balancing Innovation with Core Development. Sasha Koren and Sarah Schmalbach interview Zach Brand, Chief Digital Officer, The Guardian
Session 7— The Wall Street Journal’s Experiments With Mobile-Focused Live Coverage. Jennifer Hicks, Digital News Editor and Tyler Chance, Product Manager, The Wall Street Journal.
Session 8 — Better Mobile Innovation in News: Lessons for the Next Wave. Presentation by Sarah Schmalbach and Sasha Koren.
If you would prefer to browse the Mobile Lab team’s slides all at once, they’re below.
The Guardian US Mobile Innovation Lab was set up as a small multidisciplinary team housed within the Guardian’s New York newsroom, exploring storytelling and the delivery of news on small screens. It operated with the generous support of the John S and James L Knight Foundation.
