About the Lenfest Local Lab
Hello! We are the Lenfest Local Lab (more here), a home within the Lenfest Institute for local news product and customer experience innovation.
Who we are
We’re a small standalone product innovation team empowered by the Lenfest Institute, embedded within the Philadelphia Media Network and working in the open for the local news industry. We’re focused on experiments that reinvent the daily news user experience, exploring techniques or features that can apply to the majority of the journalism already being created by local newsrooms.
What we’ll be working on
Some ideas we’re going to explore in the lab will focus on ways to make relevant local news easier for area residents to discover. We will be experimenting with more sophisticated uses of location information and technology to engage local residents with news, which we think will help reduce isolation in communities, create connections and highlight spaces or groups that would benefit from better news experiences. Our team will explore how valuable these homegrown products could be to residents, and give us evidence on which to base the development of new business models local news organizations can adopt and take ownership of themselves.
Without further ado, please meet the team!
The range of skills and backgrounds of the folks who have joined the team reflects our committment to community engagement, location-based product experimentation and designing around the real needs of local communities. Many of us will be based in Philadelphia, with a few of us working remotely from New York all the way to Japan. We’re thrilled to introduce you to the Lenfest Local Lab — welcome!
Sarah Schmalbach, Lead and Product Director
As the product director in the lab, I will draw on my experience as a journalist and a product manager to help build and test ways local news organizations can provide better user experiences and provide more value.
I studied journalism at NYU before becoming a mobile product manager for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Daily News and Philly.com where I helped build the first mobile product development team. I also led digital product development at USA TODAY, overseeing launches of their Android app, mobile site and other experimental projects.
Most recently I co-led the Guardian US Mobile Innovation Lab, a small cross-disciplinary team of developers, editors and reporters exploring new ways to display stories on small screens. We were embedded in the Guardian’s New York office, launching nearly two dozen mobile storytelling experiments over the course of two years thanks to generous funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
“I am thrilled to be back in my hometown doing this work. It’s a critical time for newsrooms and publishers to be evolving, innovating and trying new things to reach existing as well as new audiences. Our lab will be a test bed for local news products that empower people and leverage technology and design to more closely and actively build journalism’s value to local communities.”
André Natta, Editorial Director
André started and maintained the local independent news site, The Terminal, in Birmingham, Ala. for more than 10 years. A 2018 John S. Knight Journalism Fellow, he spent his year exploring how local and regional journalism can best evolve to be more accessible. André has also written columns for the Poynter Institute and B-Metro Magazine in addition to serving as a digital news producer for both the Southern Education Desk, a Corporation for Public Broadcasting funded regional journalism collaborative, and NPR member station WBHM. He served as part of the organizing team for #wjchat for six years.
He’s previously worked for years in both hospitality, serving as a general manager for a historic inn, and in economic development for agencies in Savannah, Ga. and Birmingham, Ala.
“I’m looking forward to getting out and learning from Philadelphia, and hoping it will be able to better listen to and learn from itself as a result of what we discover along the way.”
Faye Teng, User Experience Designer
Faye graduated this summer from Drexel University’s Interactive Digital Media department. At Drexel she gained impressive experience using experimental interactive technologies in her design projects and learned a broad range of innovative user experience tools and techniques. For her senior project she helped create an interactive pop-up exhibit highlighting the work of two minority creators. The exhibit utilized NFC and Leap Motion technology, as well as a 60-inch multi-touch screen and web apps optimized for an iPad to help visitors engage in learning more about the artists’ creations and their cultures.
“I feel lucky to join Lenfest Institute’s Local News Lab as a UX designer. Ever since I was introduced to user experience design, I truly see the value of user-centered design, and my goal is to design things to be practical before they become beautiful. Nowadays, with more and more people using smartphones and being active on the internet and social media, news organizations have so much potential to innovate and create better user experiences by devoting close attention to emerging technology trends.”
Brent Hargrave, Engineer
Brent is a full stack engineer based in New York, NY focused on building digital products whose aim is to help shape behavior for the better. Previously he contributed open source code to projects for The Guardian Mobile Innovation Lab and Open mHealth. He also co-founded Sonar Media, Inc., where he was the lead developer for Sonar, an app that showed users how they were connected to others via public social media profile information and location information from Foursquare, Twitter and Facebook.
Ajay Chainani, Engineer
Ajay is a software engineer with years of experience helping build and advise startups in the United States and Japan. He specializes in iOS development and has helped build multiple award winning mobile applications, including Spring, which was recognized by Apple as one of the “Best Apps of 2014” and Sonar, which launched at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2011 and won second place in the Startup Battlefield competition.
Throughout the year we’ll be looking for more collaborators in Philly and in other local news markets. We’ll be on the hunt for new ideas that fit into our focus and most importantly critiques of ideas we’re testing or thinking about trying. Please contact us anytime at lab@lenfestinstitute.org or you can find us on Twitter @lenfestlab.
Thanks for your interest in this experiment. We’re looking forward to a great year.
The Lenfest Local Lab is a small, multidiscplinary product and user experience innovation team located in Philadelphia, PA supported by The Lenfest Institute for Journalism.
The Lenfest Institute for Journalism is a non-profit organization whose mission is to develop and support sustainable business models for great local journalism. The Institute was founded in 2016 by entrepreneur H.F. (Gerry) Lenfest with the goal of helping transform the news industry in the digital age to ensure high-quality local journalism remains a cornerstone of democracy.
