And the winners are…
Drum roll, please.
The semester is coming to a close, and it’s safe to say the UA’ School of Journalism’s first product development class was a success. All of the students started the course with zero experience in product development or a lean canvas business model, but by December 10 we were conducting pitch proposals to the largest newspaper in Tucson.
Nine teams competed for just under $5,000 and the opportunity to work as an innovation fellow at the Arizona Daily Star during the spring 2019 semester, developing their product pitch into fruition. After all of the teams presented their pitches to a panel of judges, Editor-in-Chief of the Arizona Daily Star, Jill Jorden Spitz, announced our winners: the two teams of Ava Garcia and Rocky Baier and Erin Thomson and Phillip Bramwell.
Garcia and Baier’s product pitch, named Tu Salud Tucson, identified that the Latinx community in Tucson was having trouble finding doctors, healthcare information and news about health trends. Through research, the team found that there are about 230,000 Latinx people in Tucson, and of those, 31.6 percent do not have healthcare coverage and 27, 384 of those residents only speak Spanish.
“We chose to focus on Latina moms in Tucson because we wanted to improve how we were serving this community,” Garcia said. “As we went out and did more empathy interviews, however, we saw that the problem we found — a lack of Latinx-focused health news — wasn’t unique to just moms, but Latinx families as a whole.”
The team explained that the lack of health information for this Tucson community stems from many factors, such as a language barrier, a lack of Latinx doctors, a lack of trust within doctor’s offices, and cultural stigmas.
At the Star, the team plans to develop an app that solves these problems, and can provide information and news in both English and Spanish.
“We are excited to keep looking into this issue and testing our product with our audience to hone in on what feature of our proposed app could be the most useful to our community,” Garcia said. “We are so excited to learn more about what we can do to improve our product and make a difference!”
Thomson and Bramwell’s product is named AccessAbility. The team identified that people with disabilities have problems finding news regarding events, access, and resources to bring together a community that is otherwise not represented.
They found that in Arizona, about 500,000 people use mobility devices, and in the U.S., 1 in 3 of 20-year-old workers will be disabled before retirement age. Thomson and Bramwell shared a story that exemplifies accessibility problems in Tucson in their pitch: to enter Caruso’s Italian Restaurant, wheelchair users have to venture around the corner from the entrance of the restaurant, down an alley, and through a back door.
Their proposed solution? An app that uses crowdsourcing and personal testimonies from people in the community to identify places in Tucson with good, mediocre, or terrible accessibility with a mapping feature and user review feature.
“I’ve always wanted to do everything in my power to use my journalism skills and privilege to help others within my community and this opportunity gave me the leverage to make it possible,” Thomson said. “Although there’s a lot of problems that still need to be resolved when it comes to disability, access is a key point in getting people to the places they need to and ultimately want to go.”
The team said the product could be expanded to more cities past Tucson, too, since this problem seems to be universal. One of the first goals they will tackle next semester will be applying for grants and adding transportation options to the app.
“Getting out the word about the app too will be another key aspect to developing user-sourced information,” Thomson said. “Ultimately we want to continue our relationship with people with physical disabilities to guarantee a product that will benefit residents of Tucson and hopefully, the entire country.”
Congratulations to the winning teams! We all can’t wait to see how your products come to life next semester! From the entire product class, thank you to Mike McKisson and Becky Pallack for all of the help, guidance, and encouragement this semester. All of us have learned more about a growing sector of journalism, and are excited to use these newfound skills in the future.
