The Do’s and Don’t’s of Media Product Development
By Dominika Heusinkveld
It’s easy to make a bad innovative product; just ask these billion-dollar corporations. From New Coke to Microsoft Bob, rolling out a product only to have it fail happens to the best of us. For news organizations, who rarely have millions of dollars to throw at innovation and development, it’s critical to get product innovation right. But learning how to make a new and successful news product is a lot more than just coming up with cool ideas.
In Mike McKisson’s Media Product Development class at the University of Arizona’s School of Journalism, students are learning how to create innovative news products and improve their odds of success. A key place to start is by realizing that there’s more to product innovation than just creative brainstorming. As Tendayi Viki points out in his Medium article, a cool new product is useless if it doesn’t sell. You do need creativity, Viki says, but you also need a sustainably profitable business model — one in which “we make stuff people want.”
The news industry of the past has created content based on what editors wanted to print, not on what readers wanted to read. That worked in an era of newspapers and little competition, but it is not sustainable today. News organizations that want to stay profitable need to create information products that are relevant to their audience. The current generation of journalism students is learning how to do just that.
Here are some initial tips about the process of news product development:
Don’t
-Start by finding a solution for your audience
-Assume you know what your audience wants
-Invest in final product development early in the process
-Expect your solution to be final
Do
-Start by finding a problem to solve for your audience
-Talk to your potential market using empathic interviewing techniques
-Try out various solutions with a test audience
-Test and re-test your product with consumer feedback and continued improvement
This fall, McKisson’s students will follow this process and come up with several new media products. Stay tuned for more thoughts and insights.
