skull- the dying industry
What is the future of the local news?
Modes of engagement, attitudes and insights
Introduction
The reason why I like this project is because I had a significant learning about the topic that ultimately became a behavioral change in me. I didn’t interact with local news very often (or nothing) but after doing the research, I have a different opinion now towards the efforts and challenges that the industry faces and now I consider that I am involved and educated on what happens in my neighborhood and whereabouts.
“I believe that consultants are constantly learning from different fields which I find very powerful and life-changing. ”
Timeline
The project was developed in 3 months in a team of 4, two design researchers and two research assistants from Northwestern Journalism School during the summer of 2018.
My role
I primarily worked on managing the client, managing the research assistant’s activities, fieldwork planning and scheduling, developing interviews with experts remotely and local news consumers in San Francisco, participating in analysis and synthesis sessions, generating discussions and creating insights, designing the look and feel of various presentations and developing various analysis and synthesis frameworks.
The problem
Local news coverage across America is shrinking.
Without robust local news, citizens will not have the information they need for their everyday lives about their community’s government institutions, schools, businesses and neighbors.
The business model that has supported local news reporting in cities across the United States has been greatly disrupted.
Steep revenue losses have led to cuts that hinder local news outlets’ ability to provide information about local government, civic institutions, businesses, schools and residents.
Context understanding
We talked to local news experts and news stakeholders from SFchronicle, Indystar, Chicago Tribune, Whereby.us, Hearken, Mission Local, Membership Puzzle and Colorado Sun.
We wanted to understand what is the past, current and future industry landscape, how audiences engage with local news today, what are the challenges and successes of the industry and ultimately learn from first-hand experience what are the hopes and concerns for the local news.
We realized that Local News is facing 3 key challenges:
Building relationships with audiences
Finding sustainable business models
Ensuring long-term resilience
We also learned that Local News is an evolving industry with great opportunities to explore further and learn from audiences.
How might we involve readers during the storytelling process?
How might we adopt practices from other consumer-facing industries?
How might we cultivate a positive community influencer role?
Develop new metrics to evaluate business growth and success?
From initial deck
Design Approach & Field Research
We divided our sample of research participants into three groups: non-users, secondary users and primary users. This helped us understand the spectrum of needs, behaviors and attitudes shown by local news audiences.
50 Online diaries using dscout (online diaries) across the U.S. to secondary and primary users.
Objective: Understand current local news behaviors and moments of interaction.
We created a one-pager digital tool in order to capture and analyze participants with the same parameters. This allowed us to have a synthesized profile of each participants in order to find patterns and localize similar behaviors. Later, the behaviors that we found in the dscout analysis became the archetype pillars of the research.
I was in charge of creating the initial and iterating structure of the dscout study, followed up with the dscout participants and later on, created the one-pager tool with all the analysis parameters.
dscout planning
This is a framework that I created to develop the structure of the digital tool.
One pager analysis tool
Analysis wall
A hungry researcher
18 In-homes to local news audiences and potential audiences in three cities; San Francisco, Chicago and Indianapolis.
Objective: Understand key challenges and attitudes towards local news.
I was in charge of developing the in-home protocol, which had the following structure:
1. Understand what are the local news behaviors.
2. Uncover modes of engagement. We created a card sorting exercise that helped us get to the bottom of how and why readers want to engage with local news.
3. The future of local news. We created prompts in order to speculate about the future of the industry.
fieldwork - debrief worksheet
These are the main findings:
Media Mentalities
We uncovered an attitudinal framework that helps define four main attitudes showcased by our participants. These key attitudes are called Media Mentalities.
Media Mentalities
media mentalities based on archetypes
media mentalities based on archetypes
Modes of Interaction
Each of the four mentalities interact with local news in different ways; these differences are most clearly seen by when, how and why they seek out content. By identifying how people interact with sources and consume information, local news organizations can develop new products to satisfy each of their needs.
modes of interaction
Modes of Consumption
How people interact with news sources is only half of the story. We were also interested in how people consumed stories, once they had access. These patterns of consumption are distinct across the four mentalities and highlight opportunity spaces and pain points for news organizations to address.
modes of consumption
Audience Challenges
Local news audiences were able to express key pain points and challenges they experience while interacting with local news. Uncovering these are key to be able to understand what local news organizations might do to address the challenges audiences face.
People feel overwhelmed by local news, resulting in a lack of engagement.
People feel like local news lacks convenience, causing them to trade off speed and quality.
People feel like there are a plethora of sources and players in local news, making it difficult to navigate.
People have limited resources to invest in local news and often can't justify the cost.
People feel that they have a deteriorating relationship with local news organizations.
Insights and Opportunities
Through the course of listening to local news consumers and their stories, we were able to uncover specific areas that local news organizations can focus their attention on to improve reader experiences and loyalty.
Stay tuned!
In Spring 2019 Northwestern’s Knight Lab is running a series of product development classes using this research as their input. I am sure that they will come up with great solutions!
With direction from Joe Germuska, director of Northwestern University Knight Lab.
Also, I am grateful for the great contributions by the Northwestern research assistants, Harriet White and Samarth Soni.
But most of all, thankful for the great opportunity to collaborate with Paulina Carlos, Kelly Coney and Ric Edinberg from INSITUM –great people and high-quality humans.
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