This weekend I went to the Society for News Design Conference and Workshop in Denver. My hope was to get insights for my capstone and independent research project–and I did. I haven’t spent this much concentrated time with journalists in nearly two years. I was reminded of the essence of these kinds of people. I was reminded of where their inspiration, motivations and also fears come from. These people are experience designers, they want to help people understand complex ideas.
Below are general accounts and conversations I had with journalists, designers and engineers. I will continue to compile this list:
Dave Wright Jr., Senior Interactive Designer at NPR
Dave and I discussed our favorite NPR radio shows. He started by asking me what my local station was. With a blank stare I told him it was essentially iTunes. I’m a podcast junkie, I told him. I nodded my head back and forth, who do I love more? Radiolab or Planet Money? Then we got to the essence of journalism. Both shows tell amazing, stunning stories. But we can certainly agree that Planet Money does the kind of reporting that journalists do. Radiolab lacks those “news values” we keep hearing about, like timeliness for example. Those stories exist in the ether, they’re not linked to today or 3 weeks ago.
So how come when Planet Money reporters don’t know the housing market is the way it is and why Toxie, their toxic asset dies, how come they can say they don’t know? Why does The New York Times need to be an authority but Planet Money doesn’t?
We somehow, then, came to talk about cloth diapers.
Sam Berlow, Font Bureau; Bill Couch, USA Today; Felipe Fortes, Treesaver
I dined with these three gentleman on Saturday night. To be honest, we discussed so much but mostly why the community is stuck in their funk. I asked why is there such a leap to get on the iPad bandwagon when Richard Saul Wurman himself mentioned how few actual non-developers own one themselves. One of these kind gentlemen pointed out that newspapers have fallen behind on so many curves that this is their chance to finally be on the ball.
I covered the e-tablet session which included discussions from Couch, Mario Garcia Jr, Jared Cockon and Dan Zedek. came to think that while an e-tablet conversation is important but also maybe short sighted, it did do something higher level. It opened up the platform conversation, the HTML5/CSS3 conversation.
Developing for iPads means that news companies need to think about their phones, tablets, sites, browsers and as Berlow mentioned: their brand.
Dennis Brack, Washington Post Design Director (soon to be at Foreign Policy)
Out visiting the pubs of Denver, Dennis and I came to talk about his move to Foreign Policy. We discussed what their news model would be like and what he sees for the future of the product and his team. I then asked him what he thought people are looking for.
“People are looking for clarity,” Brack said. There was a time when people were on the internet and broadly exploring but now they want to get to what they want to find. He is going from a major publication to a niche magazine, clarity is key.
Javier Zarracina, Graphics Director at the Boston Globe
Javier and I quickly chatted to catch up on where we are and what we have been doing. He said what we need to do is apply the knowledge we already have. We need to make our graphics interactive. Readers want something that is useful and compelling, he said. They want new experiences, new ways to interact and new storytelling forms.
Jeremy Gilbert, Assistant Professor at Medill, Northwestern
My post from the SND.org blog:
Trends are not sustainable solutions and they certainly don’t solve problems at their roots. This morning, I sat down to chat about interaction design and news trends with Jeremy and Jessica Gilbert at the Medill School of Journalism in at Northwestern University and Jennifer George-Palilonis, SND’s Society for News Design Education Director.
It would have been great if news companies invented Groupon, Craigslist, Yelp and Twitter. But they didn’t. And really, advertising and money from other services are simply revenue models. They are not directly related to news content. We questioned if people would pay for content and debated if the “everything for free” concept is a phase.
People are willing to pay for service, trust and quality. We pay for Flickr, Dropbox and Netflix. Readers are looking for solutions to cut through the noise online. Twitter is so valuable because we can depend our network to filter trustworthy, useful content.
Jeremy and I spent time talking about the power of automated story crafting. What would the news look like if we let reporters gather and write but let computers process and parse the information? Can machines help bring context and individualized stories to our readers? We can move away from Wiki style live coverage to something that will be much more valuable for our staffs and readers.
As we look beyond trends and into the next few decades a few themes are visible. We will see changes in how we depend on our networks, our editors, computer automated resources and bringing more context to news.
