How we plan to share our process (and show our work) in the Lenfest Local Lab
We believe that in order to create lasting change in journalism, we need to prioritize explaining the benefits of our process over celebrating the success of a single experiment.
Who are we here for?
Serving the existing journalism ecosystem means recognizing the differences within. For example, a newsroom product manager may be interested in learning about the tools we used to launch an experiment while a veteran editor wants to read about how a brand new idea in journalism still aligns with traditional reporting practices and ethics. Meanwhile, reporters may want to learn how new products can help them reach more people with their work, and newsroom UXers might be seeking examples of the type of user research you can do in less than a day. If we—and other news innovation teams—succeed, experimentation will start feeling automatic in newsrooms, instead of an addition to the long list of things that already need to get done.
While we imagine the primary audience for our work in the lab will be others in journalism interested and/or working in innovation, we hope that what we share will be of interest to people considering joining journalism’s ranks — including designers, engineers, and aspiring entrepreneurs. Both groups are interested in seeing how journalism can and might evolve to better serve communities, but the latter may also be interested in learning how to navigate some of the barriers keeping them from becoming involved in the process. The ability to explain our work to people contemplating how to join the news industry (while avoiding the use of jargon) will hopefully help us build trust and possibly also generate additional suggestions for products and approaches.
Our editorial philosophy
Outlining an editorial philosophy for sharing the lab’s work has been tricky because we aren’t publishing news ourselves, so we can’t necessarily rely on all of our existing newsroom instincts. But we are publishing stories about the process of innovating in local journalism, so how we approach writing about ourselves and our work can feel fuzzy as a result.
As a lab, and a home for product experimentation, it’s essential for us to publish our assumptions and test our hypotheses in the open and gather feedback about what works and what doesn’t. A newsroom on the other hand, as a general rule, delivers its finished product without explaining “how the sausage was made.” So a question I’ve asked myself many times over the past few months is: How might we share the energy, passion, and openness from our team’s process — including insights from our e-mails, video chats, and Slack threads — in a way that’s useful? How can we share ideas about sustainable new product strategies and collaborative teamwork without just adding to the noise?
Regardless of what things end up looking like, our philosophy is based on my belief that a news lab should be willing to share how an idea for an experiment is developing before a slick-looking prototype is unveiled. We cannot claim to want to make lasting changes to journalism without being open to valuable, critical feedback from journalists and all communities throughout the process.
That element of ongoing transparency in the lab is something that stood out during my initial conversations with Sarah about joining the team: the goal was to share our thoughts as we had them — not only after we had validated them. We talked about needing to be less afraid of someone taking an idea and more focused on making sure a good idea is understood so it can be built upon. Our hope is that this transparency could lead to the quicker adoption of experimental features if news communities respond to them positively.
This outpost on Medium will be a part of our editorial approach of sharing what we learn. We’ll also be leveraging our presence on Twitter, @lenfestlab, and hope to explore other possibilities along the way, including audio and video. As Sarah said in her introductory post, we’ll also be sharing wireframes and hypotheses — which we’ve started doing in these user experience focused posts by my colleague and the lab’s UX designer and researcher, Faye Teng. So far she’s shared insights into the research behind our first app — a location-aware app you can download now called HERE for Local Journalism — and explains how several versions of our wireframes and product designs evolved over the summer. It’s our hope that a glimpse into our process will be at least one model for how to develop products for and with the community.
We’ll also look at how we share lessons learned through various channels in our home metro market of Philadelphia and beyond. This could include anything from appearing on a radio program or podcast to participating at conferences and community meetings to writing op-eds.
The purpose of my role as editorial director of the Lenfest Local Lab is to make sure we’ve explained our work and helped it reach everyone interested in sustaining and growing local news through product innovation. Part of explaining our work is also explaining the framework we’re thinking about using to distribute the output of the lab’s experimentation and what’s behind that approach.
How I got here
I was drawn to this role in the lab because it combined two areas I’ve become very interested in and experienced with during my career: local news and revitalization efforts. I’ve spent most of my professional life shifting between roles in journalism, hospitality, and economic development. My jobs have often required examining situations to determine what’s missing. I’ve been living and breathing “local” and learning what it means for a community to thrive for a long time, always seeking solutions for those gaps. This time, my role is less about finding what’s missing and more about exploring new ways to make local news and information more available and accessible, and then also helping those ideas spread. This work will build on what I spent last year exploring as a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University.
My interest in local news accessibility came from going door to door in Georgia and Alabama, learning from and sharing with my stakeholders while working in economic revitalization districts in Savannah and Birmingham. Those conversations and other personal and professional experiences have reinforced my belief that you need to connect with the community you’re serving as fully as possible. Knowing how people actually live their lives and navigate the streets on a daily basis gives you a better baseline to work from when thinking of possible solutions.
That is one of the major reasons I moved to Philadelphia from Birmingham to join the lab. Knowing a city or a neighborhood’s traditions and habits plays a major role in determining how a new product can be developed and whether it will be adopted. Explaining how these local community forces intersect with the traditions and processes already exist within local news organizations will also likely shape how the lab approaches its work.
How we’ll measure the success of showing our work
Success will be seeing extended conversations about our experiments being carried out in Philadelphia and elsewhere. It means seeing people talk about what we’ve done, but also what we might have missed and how it can be improved. Success will also be seeing the insights, code or best practices we share being tweaked or built upon to work for other local news communities. I’ll be interested in seeing if explaining the hypothesis behind an experiment will help communities understand why it’s being done.
I feel this strategy is as much of an experiment as the prototypes and frameworks we’ll develop over the coming months. I’m looking forward to learning from all of you and hope you’re willing to share with me over time. You can always send me an email: andre@lenfestinstitute.org or just reach out via Twitter or Mastodon.
The Lenfest Local Lab is a small, multidisciplinary 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.
