Tiny, Scrappy And Hungry: How Small Newsrooms Can Launch Products On A Shoestring
6:00PM Aug 26, 2023
Speakers:
Keywords:
product
launch
talking
newsletter
building
audience
newsroom
creating
thinking
work
news
programs
user
staff
helped
business
resources
designate
cuny
focus
Hello, everybody. See Oh yes, there's still enthusiasm in the last session. Of Oh, and I really appreciate that, that I thank you so much. We're gonna get started here in just a second. But everyone's having a good conference so far and by so far, I mean, it's over. Right? Good. Good. Good week so far. Yeah. And you saved the best session for last I'm gonna say so. Thank you for coming. I really appreciate it. This is tiny, scrappy and hungry, how small newsrooms can launch products on a shoestring. And so I hope many of you are from small newsrooms here. Is that Yes. Awesome. And I think you're here because you're not trying to throw away your shot at launching products. Right. Thank you for laughing and thank you for letting me be cheesy here for a moment. But yes, the whole point of this session is what we can do as a small newsroom with less and and by less I mean, not a lot of resources. Not a lot of staff. Not a lot of time. And so really, this is a show and tell in a way of how some small newsrooms have been able to do just that and we hope that you come away with some tips, some tricks, some takeaways that you can bring back to your newsroom and feel hopefully a little bit inspired and kind of have a little bit more guidance as you go back and want to launch products and, you know, whatever else you're doing in your newsroom. I'm really excited about this today. Because this is a little, a little bit of a dream of mine, because I have gotten to work with these two incredible women in many different capacities and I'm really here just to highlight all of the incredible work that they're doing. So we have Nikita Roy, who is the founder and publisher of the NRA nation. She will tell you a little bit more about that. And she is a participant in one of our programs that we've done, and I've of course forgot to introduce myself, but I was so excited about introducing them that I forgot to do that. My name is Kyle plants. I run our professional development programs at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY in New York, which is always a mouthful to say. But we run programs on executive leadership, entrepreneurial journalism, and product so we have a lot of different product programs. And Nikita was one of our participants. And so I'm really excited that she's here. And then Helen Thompson, Helen and I go way back because we used to work together at Science News magazine where she is the multimedia editor. And so she I've been part of her journey. And helping, you know, talk about how products work for a printed legacy magazine, which is really exciting. And so I'm grateful that she is here and able to talk about all the work that she's doing. So I'm going to just do kind of a quick level setting here. Just to make sure we're all on the same page about like what we're talking about what we're talking about product product, thinking all that and then I really want to turn it over to them to talk about how they've been able to launch products. And then we'll have time for questions at the end because this is going to be a quick hour. But before we do that, I do want a little bit of conversation here right so I would love to hear from some of you about what roadblocks or challenges you're facing as a small newsroom when you're working on or launching products. people stealing your work. What do you mean by that?
Me in such a way that it is very purposeful, then turn that into a story really coming out of it gave me no recognition whatsoever. No attribution. It's happened a few times. Mostly it doesn't happen. But I think that they feel like they can because I'm in newsroom of one. And who am I going to what am I gonna do about it? I won't mention it.
Well, I'm very sorry that that has happened. But that is definitely a challenge when you're us newsroom. Have one there. In the back. Did you raise your hand? Yeah, go ahead. We have a microphone coming. So feel free to use that. as well.
One huge challenge I have is for my startup like coming trying to come up with a sustainable business model so that I can pay my bills and stop having a non paying hobby actually have some type of business.
Yeah, it's kind of like what do you focus on? Right? Like there's so many different ways you can go about doing it? How do I know which ones to really focus on to be sustainable? Yes, thank you. Me here. We've got a couple more over here.
Hi, we're a newsroom of a so everyone wears like 20 hats and I think it's the challenge that all small newsrooms face its lack of money and lack of time, right? Like we have all these great ideas. But sometimes we don't have the skills to do some of the things like produce events or produce podcasts or produce newsletters and we rely on freelancers, but really, to make to pull it all together. It's money and time.
It's exactly what we're going to be talking about today. How many people have an engineering team in their newsroom? You're in the right place, because I know many people don't. So how are you able to deal with the technical issues and those as you launch products? Let's hear from one more. I think someone over here raise their hand or yeah, go here in the second row. Helen. Thank you.
I was gonna say money in time too, but also just overworked staff. Which comes back to money and time but everyone is you know, wearing all those hats and has so much to do already so much. on their plates.
Burnout is so real, and we will definitely talk about that too. Thank you. Yes. And I also hope that this shows that you're all going through very similar issues, you have the same roadblocks and challenges but hopefully, in our session today, we will be able to highlight some of the things to help navigate those roadblocks and challenges. Thank you, Helen. I appreciate it. All right. So just like I said, we're going to start with a little bit of level setting here, just so we're all on the same page of you know, what we're talking about with product, what is product thinking all of that. There are many, many different definitions of product in journalism, and you can ask anyone and they might have a different definition. For our intents and purposes today. I will be using this definition of from NIDA Selena um She is a wonderful colleague of mine at the new Mark J school, and she is unfortunately not here this week. We miss her but she is in Austria. And so her definition of product is product is a function at the intersection of editorial tech and business that actively ensures that all products and services and media organization creates a dress user needs provide an excellent user experience and advanced the overarching business strategy. So it's that sweet spot right there in between editorial tech and business and I think the key parts of this one obviously products should be thought with user needs, what is the your audience want? What do they need? How are they experiencing that product, and hopefully it is a good experience. Otherwise they are not going to come back, spend their time with it or spend money on side product. And then that key part that I think is always missing from a lot of conversations is that business strategy. You know, it is something you might not be thinking about as a reporter or as an editor. But the work that you do it helps influence that ultimate business strategy. And so that's something we should always be keeping in mind with our two. Product thinking when we talk about that product thinking is the ability to think across those disciplines. So technology user experience business to define and execute a strategic plan. It focuses on creating content that's designed to meet the needs and desires of specific target audiences. You'll hear from our panelists today about how they've been able to launch products based off of what their audience wants, what their needs are. And how they've been able to do that. And then also, product thinking involves identifying problems and pain points that consumers are experiencing and developing content that directly addresses those issues. So once again, I think kind of the theme of this is, what does your audience want and hopefully we're launching products that fulfill that need. However, that is not always true. And I know this right? Sometimes the product what the reality is of launching products is you someone on staff who has an idea and they want to do it. Maybe it's your editor in chief or you know your publisher, and they're like we need to do this and so now you have to launch a product on that. And so how can you do that? The shiny object syndrome that I like to call it what's the newest big thing right now obviously, we'll talk a little bit about AI I apologize. But AI right. It's a it's a kind of a shiny thing that What are you potentially thinking about using AI for with products, but is it time for you to invest in that Do you have time to do that? How about do you have resources to allocate for that? But that is sometimes how products are launched in the world, right? You're like, oh, everyone's doing this thing. I want to do that right now. Wanting to reach an audience that you currently don't have. I've heard this before from newsrooms about how they're like, We need to go after Gen Z. So we need to launch a product that helps us do that. That's a great goal. But you know, how are you going to kind of do that, but that's how a lot of products are launched. And then funding. We'll talk a little bit about this today, too. Sometimes you have a funder that says I will give you X amount of money to do a thing. That is also a valid reason of launching a product. But then you have to figure out what product to launch in order to help fulfill your user needs as well and what your audience wants. But these are all real and this you know, the product thinking way is you know it's a great tool to use when launching products but I also reckon I wanted to recognize that not everybody that is going to be able to go through that process every single time you launch a product. Sometimes you have to launch a product because your boss tells you or because you get a grant and you need to spend that money. So I just wanted to address the actual reality when we talk about product thinking really quickly, just so that I know our panelists because I want to get them up here are going to talk a little bit about the different stages when they're talking or launching products. So I just really want to highlight some of those here. You know, when launching a product, you have the idea the ideation stage, what does that product look like? The definition of what it actually can be prototyping and building you know what a Version Beta version of what that can look like building the initial design, validation and testing, making sure that it all looks good and works the way it should before you launch it into the field launch it and it goes to the market there. So I just really wanted to kind of highlight some of the various stages here of the product development process. The reason that I mentioned I just really quickly that I'm talking about this is because I'm very passionate about it, obviously, but because at our Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, we have programs that distinctly talk about how you can do product thinking in small newsrooms. And so this was one of our programs that we've run. We've had seven cohorts that have gone through this program from all around the world. And Nikita is a wonderful byproduct of one of our programs of this program. And so she, you know, being able to within two months be able to go through that process. What are the different phases of product thinking and how are you able to launch a product? We also have this program which is coming up and hence a QR code here. You also have this on your seat, so take it with you. But we have our news Product Management Certification Program that's coming up in partnership with the news product Alliance. So if you are looking to learn more about what it means to potentially be a product manager or you have a staff member that wants to explore that more or you know, something along those lines, we have a program coming up in January that will address that applications will open in September. So feel free to sign up for email notification so you can stay on top of all the wonderful cool things that are happening here with it. And yeah, I just wanted to highlight this program. I'm going to pass on I'm going to stop talking and I'm gonna pass it over to my colleague Nikita who's going to talk about some of the tips and things that she's learned when launching products with the NRA nation. So yeah.
Hi, everyone. I'm really excited to be here today and talk about how we've been building news products at a really small newsroom, very limited resources, and how we've been implementing product thinking in our journey. So just to give you a bit of a quick background, my name is Nikita Roy I am the founder of a digital media company. And we've launched three different products. One of the first products, not the first products, but one of the most recent products was our more internationally focused global podcast on AI and journalism called the newsroom robots, which, where I go and interview newsroom leaders and industry experts to understand what's their perspective on the use of AI in journalism and how they're using it currently. And we're currently charted on the top tech podcast across 25 countries and Apple podcasts. The other publication which was actually the first product that we launched, was the NRI nation. It's a digital news publication for the Indian diaspora where we curate news and information related to them and produce journalism that we weren't really seeing. The Indian diaspora is really unique in the sense that we are the largest diaspora we are the most spatially distributed population with 32 million people who are Indian citizens or people of Indian origin who live outside of India. And the term NRI stands actually for a non resident Indian, which is officially what the government of India also describes us as. And the product I'm actually going to be talking about here today is the informed and ri, which was developed with the support of the international center for journalists. we prototyped and ideated this as part of their leap news Innovation Lab. And that's the product I'm really going to delve deeper into today. So, just to set a context, we're really small, as I was saying, five newsrooms. They're all contract workers freelancers that work with us as well out of that our team of three people were actually who were the core part of the team who was involved in the lead news Innovation Lab and was directly involved in this product. And we got funding at the end of our elite news innovation lab from ICFJ and just secured another funding from Harvard innovation labs. June so this is a completely grant funded project and we had to convince funders to invest in our product and that's the only way we could do somebody was talking about a startup. I know all about it. It's a while trying to go and convince funders to support our product. But I'm going to talk about how this really helped about so when we went into leap news with an innovation lab. Our challenge was building trust in news and we were very excited about this challenge and wanting to apply and be a part of it because you were a new company, and how do we build that trust and relationship of trust with our audience? And we wanted to learn more about it. And that's what ICFJ kind of guided us on how to be transparent with your audience. Writing your editorial guidelines, what should that look like? And one of the key things that we were asked tasked to do early on was go and talk to our audience. Trusting news has this amazing interview guide that we had used to understand really what the specific needs of our target customer is. What's their pain point like? Understanding what their news experience is like, and that's how we were actually able to ideate and build out the informed and ri which is this five day digital media literacy course based on WhatsApp. For the Indian diaspora. The diaspora is completely on WhatsApp. It's a huge part of our daily lives. And that's why we decided to target misinformation. And by educating them more about how they can find out about a fake WhatsApp message which is very common that targets the diaspora. And that's the whole reason and how we started off with building. The product was first going out and talking to our customers. And we use and we still use this quite a bit. Whenever you just meet anybody who is part of our audience to see what's your news experience, like where do you get your news from? What do you what do you feel you're missing from the news and this is what helped us. So this is kind of the product development journey that we had undertaken. And I put this here because the first four stages was part of this leap news innovation lab from about July to September last year where we built out a prototype and we got funding. And in December we started working and back in February I became part of the product emotions cohort and actually went even deeper into product thinking and it went up and down quite a bit. So as we were building out a prototype, we kept on interviewing our audience kept on speaking to them, and iterating again and again on our product to see how we could understand more about it. So what I'm here today is to kind of take away all of the key takeaways that come when Kyle asked me to join this panel, I thought about what were the really important points that we had not really done before and how did we really implement product thinking? And one of my first tips and takeaways that we had done was released zooming in on the specific user needs so right from the beginning, when ICFJ interesting news helped us to understand go and talk to our communities, we would come back and we had to cluster all of the different pain points that people were talking about. And when I became part of the product emergence cohort in February, we were introduced to this framework called empathy mapping, which became my new favorite thing, because we were able to then take all of our insights and then put them down into all of this actually empathizing with what the pain points are, what are their needs, what are they missing, what do they need what they hear, and we already had a product at this point, but at this point, we were actually more refining the topics that we would be having in our digital media literacy course. So it's based on who what do they need to do and where are they finding their information? And that's kind of target that helped us inform also the way we were developing a product trading it, and then the marketing strategies that you're thinking about. So my next thing was, we learned and this was the first time we just created something really scrappy really quickly, because when we were creating our first product, which was our digital news publication, it took a really long time. And we were struggling and figuring out what to do. But all of this was actually done within like, a few weeks, within a month because we had to present to ICFJ to get funding, and we had to create a lean MVP. So for us what that meant was just get the key features and try and see what that would look like. For us. That meant we had to get what the five days courses would be have that topic and then just create simple prototypes of what our journey would look like. How would they be seeing it on WhatsApp? What would the user form be? And these were just like rough mock ups that were created and we did everything on like the mural board, because ICFJ had this amazing template that we were able to storyboard our entire idea on. And we went through that journey to create all of this and then we again went back to it and we were using empathy mapping to see how are we informing our course. This was the first initial prototype that we created. And we just went back and forth with this, but this was a really guiding point. And this is actually what got us funding in the first place because we were able to show ICFJ that we had a prototype we had tested things out with some of the some of our users already. We knew already five different topics we were talking about. How do you find out about a fake WhatsApp message? What are emotions behind the message that could lead to lead for you to forward something and how to stop and think before you forward any WhatsApp message. And that's those are different topics that we got by talking to people and informing our strategy. And then based on this again, when I came to CUNY, I really loved this hypothesis driven development approach because we were as we were trading on our product earlier this year. This approach really helped me understand what would success look like for our product? What would that look like and this, we were able to really put this into this framework. All the resources that Kyle would be giving has links to all of these templates and everything that I have included. And we decided that okay, we the reason we were doing this was we wanted to increase trust in our brand. And the signal for us would be positive user feedback, increase engagement and increase signups and that would be how we would determine success and by putting something in just like simple, plain terms. It just helped us as a team to understand what we would need. So this was just all of the things about like quickly creating a prototype, go get funding tested out with users, there was no technical thing. Nothing we had done technically in creating a whatsapp chat bots so far. Yeah, it was all on Google Docs and a prototype on Merrill board. And that's how we got funding.
The third tip was actively seek out inclusive perspectives. That's something we did not do in the beginning. We go and whoever is accessible in our part of our demographic, and it was usually younger people because those were people that I knew more about and those are the audience that I was embedded in the community I was embedded in. And it actually wasn't until I did the CUNY program where Sally who is the Executive Director of NPA actually gave us a session about equity and inclusion and I realized I went back to all the demographics that we had looked at, and I realized we were not really spoken to older audience. And so that was something that now I'm quite mindful about when I'm building products. And so that's how we build out and so I would really suggest looking at all of the different segments in the population that you have. And based on the feedback in the the learnings of the course, we learned about building sample personas for our audience. And this is what really helped us creating a sample persona describing them their age with their personality is giving them a bit of a human touch. This way we could also it was also helping us first of all, make sure that we had all of these different segments that we were covering within the diaspora population because it ranges quite a bit and you were mainly focusing on the North American diaspora because that they have their unique characteristics based on where the location is. They have the unique record the diaspora has their unique characteristics. And so we were like, Okay, this is somebody say somebody like a tech worker, an h1 B visa person. This is what a sample persona for him would look like. But what about a sample persona for somebody who's just landed in the country from India as an international student and they are now part of the Diaspora population. This informs now our current marketing strategy. We are just soft launching this product right now testing out all the technical kinks. And as we get into the population, and this would inform how we would get to them or where the tech workers are, where are the international students by creating these sample personas, we know exactly how and where to reach all of the audience. And my fourth tip, Chad's, GBT, I am a huge AI evangelist and a fan of AI because I think it can really, really help small newsrooms. Become a superpower because of its ability to help you. So Chad CPT came about in November, I was thinking about it brainstorming a lot about it, but really, it was in while I was doing this CUNY course, we were getting all of this theory and I was like, How do I apply this to my work that I'm doing right now? And GPT actually helped me break down concepts. I had a lot of back and forth conversations with it. Understanding how it would work for our newsroom. And so what I started doing was, I started telling it, what exactly we were building. We were building this digital media literacy chatbot and I was thinking about different things that I would need to do in building out this product. And so one of the use cases that we used it was we did a pre mortem analysis and so we were like, Okay, we're building this, what are all the things that could possibly go wrong? It was telling me Okay, poor user engagement, how you can do what what? What implementation strategies, what mitigation strategies can you have? If you're having a poor user experience, if you're having technical difficulties, these are all of the roadblocks that you would potentially reach and what needs to be done in order to what you would what do you need to do so that you don't reach that so this was just helping us think way in advance of, if you don't launch in time, what's going to be the reason and trying to prepare for that in advance so that we're not caught off guard. So that was one way we use there. Another way that we use it was creating user stories. So when you are so to back up a bit I'm also I have technical expertise. I am a data scientist I code but I don't know how to build out a whatsapp chat bot. That's a completely different technical expertise in one of the biggest challenges and that I've seen working as well with technical developers has been translating the vision of what you want as a person who doesn't know that tech properly, and translating that to somebody else. And developers so that they understand it, build out all of the features you want. You have to be extremely clear and concise. And so by building out this user story, and creating what the user onboarding should look like, I fed all of this to chat GBT and chat TPT was able to produce all of these insights. And so this is something that I looked over and I was like, oh, yeah, this is exactly what I had in my mind. And it put that all into words. And instantly, this is something that would have taken me a really long time. Plus, I don't think I would have actually done it to this level because this is what the first time that I was implementing product thinking in my work. And this is how charge GPD was helping me out. It was all about prompting, I was making sure it understood exactly. There was quite a few back and forth conversations I had with it to see understood what product I was building what exactly I was needing. And I told them that okay, this is how I'm building it. I have to tell a technical developer, so that's where I went back and forth with them. And I use it as I say, it's like a technical translator. Because you need to be able to have that conversation with your developer but if you don't really know what you need to be telling them, it could really lead to a product that's not that great. So this is how we used it. And my fifth and final takeaway is keeping data as your Northstar. I'm a huge data person and I think that's something that could really help inform and guide the way our product is being done. And now I'm not just talking about quantitative data. I'm also talking about like qualitative data. We had all of these user interviews we were doing all of these testings that we were doing. And so what we really saw was with these user interviews, we could also put them in so just to backup as well. I use otter, for transcription for all of our interviews, and otter came out with this feature called Auto chat where it's again, generative AI like chat, like chat GBT, where I could ask questions and based on the transcripts that could give me data. So again, we were held using that to help us with informing what our insights would be through these user interviews. What are they looking for, and this is this was all qualitative data that we were able to then input in. And while we were building out we also had like quantitative data for our project. And so we will this the first time we're building out a whatsapp chat bot. There's no guidelines on what product what data you have to collect for this. And so we had about like four different types of data points and metrics that we needed. And so I asked Chad GBT, what data metrics to ask as well to brainstorm with it, and it came up with like, 10 different quite a few that I was not actually thinking about, or I did not know about that I should be talking to our developer about. And so this is what he, we gave this to him. And so we made sure that all of the data points are being tracked in our database. And so this is now informing how our metrics would look like and so I would say, Try asking charge GPT, what data, what data you need to collect? And this is just how we used charge GBT to help us in our journey. And for me as well leading and building a product for the first time with product thinking and all of the knowledge that I got from ICFJ and q&a. And so yeah, so to kind of wrap up, I think it's really been being user centric has been the biggest. The biggest, I think guiding takeaway that I've gotten and something that I'm going to take away is constantly talking to your audience. We kept on changing one thing I need to say we kept on changing the courses content throughout. So we started really, we had the coast content by September, and what it looks like right now is completely different from what we had in September. And that's because we constantly changed it. GBT AI generated misinformation became a huge thing. And so we included that in our topic took away something else. And these were all possible because we were able to go back and forth with people who were already interested in our work and what we were doing, and this is how we kind of build out a product and I'm happy to share more and talk more and also just a quick plug about ICFJ is also having a leap news Innovation Lab focusing on AI and journalism this year, and I highly recommend being that and also the product immersion cohort. So if you want to talk to me about any of these programs, I'm happy to share about that as well. Later. Thanks.
So I'm going to walk through a couple of case studies from Science News. We are sort of in a different stage of product thinking than he is and so you'll notice some differences as I go through them. But first, a little background on who we are. We're a legacy print publication. We've been in print since 1921. And we are published by a nonprofit, the Society for science. So our products are a biweekly print magazine, a daily news website. We have a social media presence, a video presence, we have a few different newsletters. Currently, they're all automated. And we produce classroom resources for science teachers around the country as well. And we have a student publication that has a website and a print magazine as well. Sorry, it's a bit of a mouthful. Our staff is around 30 people and one of kind of the hallmarks of our journalism is having beat writers with an expertise in specific fields of science. So kind of like a little background on product at our organization. It really started in 2019 when when five or six of us took an online course run by the night center on product thinking for newsroom leaders. So that course was really eye opening for us. It started to shift our perspective from this very typical legacy print publication mentality of like if you build it, they will come to actually talking to your audience interacting with them and asking them what they want, and then building that. It also offered it was appealing because it offered systems of prioritization as well. A way to sort of figure out what was most important to our mission to revenue or like business, that kind of thing as well. And then it also offered sort of an accountability system. So who is responsible for what having a plan for that at the beginning when you launch the product, versus coming up with it like halfway through and also kind of reducing blame when failure happens as well? And as part of that work, we as part of the coursework, we decided to found a product thinking team which is really more like a product thinking club. It does not work like a normal product team. And it may not work like the product team at your publications or the product person at your location. But it was a way for us to develop kind of a system to launch things and specifically, what has been most useful is we developed templates so that people could pitch products and there was a system they could come to the product team, get feedback. Also get feedback from stakeholders and whatever they were trying to make, and then go to the person who needs to sign off on it, Greenlight it and go from there. We also did some additional audience work through the product thinking team, but this is all to say we had sort of a general understanding of our audience. And we put systems in place to help us launch things relatively quickly. But yeah, we don't have this figured out and we may be the negative example that you don't follow. But it's important to kind of be upfront about like what's working and not working. So part of our product pitch is to force people to ask themselves questions prior to launch. So how does this new product fit into our mission? Whether it is from a revenue perspective, from serving a loyal audience perspective, that kind of thing? What is the value of it compared to the effort required to make it? Do we have the resources to make it Who is it for what audience need? Is it serving those kinds of questions? They're pretty basic, but forcing people to address them before the thing launches is vital. And then so I'm going to go through two different case studies. The first one is our Coronavirus newsletter. It was called Coronavirus update. It was a limited run newsletter. We launched it with no additional resources, just existing staff time and existing tools that we already had. So we were already using metrics for news to have sort of audience breakdown. So we had an understanding of what was appealing to our loyal audience what was appealing to casual readers. And then we already had Marketing Cloud as our newsletter tool. And then we had some specific metrics of success which are pretty standard for newsletters. So like nothing surprising there. But this is sort of like the baseline of of this product. I will say the time from pitch to launch here. It was about one week. And the reason that was able to happen is because we had a pitch template and because we had a system in place. So why did we launch so COVID stories were performing much better and metrics for news than other topics. So we knew that it would be appealing among our loyal readers specifically and then there was also like everyone else, we were in a global pandemic. And there was just a perceived societal need for a synthesis of all of this like firehose of research that was coming out. Because we had beat writers with backgrounds in science. We had two veteran reporters who had covered epidemics. Before who had covered public health before we had a staff writer with a PhD in virology, another staff writer with a background in evolutionary biology. And so even though other publications had COVID newsletters already, we felt like we were uniquely positioned to come in with a different and serve the need to like synthesize that research. We could because we had expertise that other publications didn't necessarily have. And then we also had some newsletter production capacity. We were only producing our automated newsletters at this point. So we didn't have anything narrative. We had done one previous experiment with a narrative newsletter that we had sunsetted about two years prior. And so our, the person who was producing our newsletters didn't have a bunch of additional newsletters on his plate. So he had capacity to produce this one and finally, this was a really mission driven product. Part of our mission is to help people digest the news around them. And this was definitely this fits into that very clearly, because there was just this onslaught of COVID research that people needed to sift through and we felt like this would help them do that. And then, so as part of our product pitch, we have a section on audience and it forces the person pitching the product. Do you have a specific audience in mind, and you'll see a lot of what I touched on before in this, this audience statement. So we are serving loyal readers who need scientific information that is Expertly written and curated. So we are again just like touching on we're, we're we're producing this for a specific type of person and not just like a, you know, men 25 to 34 who have engineering degrees, you know. And then how did it go? So we launched in March 2020. Like I said, it was one week from pitch to launch. During that week. I think it took a day to put a signup form together it took a day to put an email list together. The pitch was run by our editor in chief, our news director. We had an emergency product making team meeting. So it was all very fast, but it became very clear in early March that we needed to do this we couldn't just sit by the sidelines. And so that's why it happened so quickly and having the system in place made that possible. And then the first version was went out. So there are three versions of the newsletter. The first version went out two times a week. It ran from March 2020 to July 2020. It focused on latest research. It was kind of a segmented structure. So there was a segment at the beginning on a piece of research or an aspect of research that we hadn't covered on our website. There were also summaries of stories that we had covered on our website, a roundup of other coverage that we had that we thought was pretty high quality. Let's see what else there were stats there were sometimes we would riff off of a quote. So there are a variety of different sections that different writers could pitch in on. And then version two went to one time a week this decision was based on resources that we had available. So people got burnt out pretty quickly, producing a newsletter two times a week. Even if it you know was just two to three writers working on it every week. It was pretty rarely five but it did sometimes happen. And the the status of the research also changed so we weren't getting big discoveries. Every day we were getting more incremental stuff. And so it just made sense to scale it back. We also did a reader survey between version one and version two to figure out which sections of the newsletter people found most useful, and then we change the structure based on that feedback. So even though we're not doing a sort of typical product approach, where you go talk to your audience, ask them what what they want, then make the thing that they want. We did check in with our audience during this process. During the first six months, we got a one time large donation in response to this newsletter that wasn't something we necessarily solicited, but it reaffirmed that we were making something that matter to people.
Let's see version three. So also in response to resource issues we transitioned in summer 2121 to a more narrative approach where one writer worked on the newsletter each week it freed up other people to do different things. And this also allowed them to develop a different voice than other aspects of our coverage allowed for so they wrote in first person someone talked about his personal experience with long COVID Those kinds of stories, they would delve into different research topics that were of interest to them. And then we ended up sunsetting the product in November 2022. So yeah, let was this successful. One of the primary metrics that we looked at was open rate. When we started we it peaked around 68% And then it plateaued around 30. This was a really appealing stat to us. We with our previous automated newsletters. We didn't we're not seeing a 30% open rate we were seeing maybe like 15 20% And so this was really great in our eyes. However, we should have been looking kind of beyond open rate and more at growth because when we launched we automatically had 4700 subscribers we had sent an email to print and digital subscribers, and some of them already signed up. But then it kind of peaked at 20,000. And it never really grew at the rate that it was growing in the beginning. And we should have paid more attention to that. So yeah, what didn't go so well. We did have sort of a lack, and we still have a lack of newsroom wide buy in on product thinking. And so as we transition to the different versions, I don't know that we had the staff understanding of like, Who is this serving with each version, and we should have done sort of more outreach to make sure that was clear. We also did not properly allocate resources for this. You know, we had three to five people working on a newsletter at times and in a staff of 30. That's not super realistic, I guess. And we didn't really understand just how many resources were required to make something like this. We also really delayed the exit plant. That open rate was so appealing to us that we just did not want to have the conversation about when do we kill it and we should have had that conversation earlier. And so yeah, relying primarily on one thing as a metric was a mistake. We also had a very intense workflow. At one point this newsletter was edited by three or four people, which is made it the most edited product that we made in our newsroom, which, while attention to accurate accuracy is very important for us. We're a science publication. It's possible we could have scaled that back. It also one other workflow issue that we ran into is transitioning the content from the newsletter to our website. So there were times when we ran the same stories that ran in the newsletter. On our website. But that shift was really hard because I don't know if you've ever taken something from marketing cloud and tried to put it in WordPress, but a lot of junk code comes through and it's a huge pain in the ass. So that was not an ideal situation, but it did it and not transitioning as much content to our website resulted in some murky perception of impact among staff. So when you have beat reporters who really value something that lives forever somewhere so having their story live forever on a website and magazine, whatever seems more fulfilling than a newsletter that goes at once. And so there there was sort of this disconnect between the value of what they're doing and their perception of the value that of what they're doing. And so we could have done more outreach on that front and it did create some conflict. So key takeaways. Yeah, have an exit plan. It's just as important as your launch plan. It's a hard conversation to have, but it's really important to have that conversation. The reason we were able to launch so quickly is because we had a system in place through templates by having a product team by having a process by which we could launch things. And don't rely just on one metric of success. We also in this case, learned a lot by making mistakes, we evolved the product as it went on. And so that was very important as well. And so I'm going to go on to case study number two tic tac again, we launched with a budget of zero no additional resources. We just reallocated staff time and we had an existing Getty subscription and existing video editing programs and Premiere and free programs like cap cut. So we weren't spending additional money on this. Our metrics of success are pretty typical for video. The one thing that was big here compared to the other product is demographics. And I will get into that in a bit. Yeah, okay. Why we launched there was a general interest in reaching new audiences. So that means younger, more diverse. None of that is probably surprising given Tik Tok. But it was an argument for trying the platform. So tic TOCs demographics are compared to YouTube and Instagram. They are more diverse, younger and more female specifically. So on YouTube, our audience is 70 to 80% Male 3020 female and then it's about 40% under 35. On Instagram, our audience is 60% Male 40% Female also about 40% under 35. So Tiktok has a much larger percentage of its users under 35 and it has 60% female 40% Male breakdown generally, at least based on what they released. And so there was an argument that we could help reach these editorial and organizational goals by trying out this this platform. There was also a staff personal interest in this like people thought it was fun. They were making their own Tik Tok videos, they're sending Tik Tok videos to their friends. And when you have a staff that is incredibly burnt out, like doing something fun is valuable. And so that was part of the equation here as well. We also had some increased producer availability, mainly my availability. We had sort of scaled back on YouTube because the production value bar was higher there. And then on tick tock, it's a much lower production value bar. So we felt like we could make more videos for tick tock than we could for YouTube. We also had an additional producer position that was going to become available in 2022. And so we would get a little more resources to shift some of my focus more to video, whereas I had been doing a lot of web production as well. And there weren't a lot of competitors. There still aren't a lot of science publications on Tik Tok. There are a lot of scientists and science communicators, but we felt like we were be serving an audience niche. Ideally an audience need that was not being met on the platform. And then we also had the potential to increase the lifespan of the story. So we are our plan with tick tock was just to use existing content not to create original content. And so we weren't adding additional reporting or much additional editing, although there are some, in some fact checking in both two people's plates. So it seems like it would be an easier lift for the staff who wanted to be involved. I should also mention we did a prototype for tic toc and that was part of the our ability to make the case to management that this is a thing we should try. I think if we had not if I hadn't, you know spent two hours taking a story that was on our website, doing a green screen video and just showing them what it might look like. It would have been a lot harder to convince them that this is the thing we should because I have to be honest, like most of the people I work with still work in Word. And so that tells you a lot about sort of how they might view a platform like this. I say that with love. Okay, so again, we had an audience statement. That's part of our product pitch. You'll see I hit some of the same points I made on the previous slide. And then how's it going? So the stats over the first year show that we are meeting that goal about 50 are in terms of demographics, I mean so about 55% of our audience is female 45% as male, so we are reaching a different demo than the other platforms. We are also reaching or 70 70% of our audience is under 35 on tick tock so that's a huge difference from 40% on the other platforms as well. We on the So currently we're sort of juggling standard news stories and explainers versus experimenting. So if any of you are on Tik Tok, you'll know there's a lot of meme audio, a lot of different video styles. And so this year we're trying to do a little bit of experimentation and see what sticks and it's very hit or miss. So the first year we focused on on pretty standard stuff.
And this year, it's more about just trying stuff and seeing seeing what works. It has proved to be a new sort of outlet for reporters, they and the ones that have participated really enjoy it. They enjoy building new skills, they get to host videos that they might not normally be able to host and some of them are even like building video production skills as well. We are having a lot of sustainability struggles, which should come as no surprise. So how do we keep this going is a huge question that we're grappling with. And then one other thing to note is though, we launched with like no dedicated budget, and we do not currently have a dedicated budget, but just for vertical video. We do have interest from funders. And so we were able to get some grants that have a video focus specifically where that reference Tiktok and so we hope to use those to expand our our offerings, this year. So and then one big thing that I think has worked really well with this product is just scheduling check ins for coverage that are very informal, so people can raise issues, or any problems with the workflow and then also having sort of broader check ins as well where we look at the analytics how things are going, what's working, what's not working. And those are sort of built around product retrospective work that we've done for other other projects in the newsroom. And so giving people an opportunity to say here's what's really not working, here's what is working here's what we can change now immediately. And we just do that with like Google Forms. It's super easy. And yeah, so takeaways from case study number two have this stainability conversation early. It's super important. And just like the sunsetting conversation, it's just as important as the launch. One thing that has worked really well is building the workflow into a tool that people already use, because again, we don't have a we didn't do this with like, additional resources. Ideally, I think we would have used air table but we're actually using slack because that is a tool that people already use in their day to day. And then yeah, be clear with how people can get involved, create a space for them to get feedback and experiment over and over again. And yeah, I just want to give a shout out to our current product thinking team and past members a lot of the work on the COVID newsletter was done by Kate Travis and Mike Dennison. And Kate actually put a lot of the kind of like systems and templates in place that I talked about today. So
all right, thank you, Nikita, Thank you Helen for kind of just walking us through a bit of your process there. One thing before I turn over to questions to you guys, so if you have questions, please please please raise your hand then. I do want to have a tips of resources. I want to share with you guys some of the things that they're talking about that empathy map that Nikita showed the pitch a product pitch template that Helen is was talking about what that they use to basically get buy in from their from management and you know, also to just articulate what it is you're trying to accomplish with your product. Being able to put in words I think is a great exercise. Those are resources that you can find right here, as well as the tips that they just shared throughout this presentation. So you have a mic, make sure you turn it on over there. And I want to turn to questions if you have about how they went through their process, other tips or things that they might have? I'd be happy to let's do it. And I will be the mic runner.
This is a question for Helen. And those two cases when you guys came up with those two products. Was there a specific point person on staff to be in charge of that or did it just fall in the usual hierarchy? That it all we all answer to the editor and that if that's the case of that create any roadblocks pros and cons of of that sort of thing?
Sure. So as part of our pitch template, we have a field for product owners so there is a point person in the case of the newsletter that was Mike and Kate and in the case of tic toc that was me. And then we also designate like a chief approver which in both cases was our editor in chief. We also in that pitch template use, we that we have it forces you to designate roles. So in addition to like the main person who's in charge of the thing, you have to designate who's going to actually do the thing. And we use the Rasky matrix, which I don't know if you guys have ever used but what is its responsible accountable.
I'm forgetting them as well, but it lets the informed man like it's Yeah,
yeah. informed and support. So like you're designating so like for for Tiktok I think I was the person who was accountable and then we also I designated see as contribute, collaborate, collaborate. So collaborators were like writers and editors who wanted to participate. And then support was like a member of our design team, I think. And our executive editor was like informed and my boss was also informed as well. So like designating, like, who needs to be aware of different stages of the process who is responsible for making things is kind of built into that even though there's like one point person, you it's helpful to think about who is going to contribute at different stages.
And making sure you don't have too many cooks in the kitchen? That's always I think an issue too, as well. It's Rossi it's also in the tips resources one so it's our a sci method isn't their quest. Another question? Yes.
This is a question for Nikita. I'd love to see the actual sort of tool that you developed. I don't know if it's launched, if you can show it or I can connect with you offline, whatever is convenient.
Yes, absolutely. I would love to connect with people over here who would like to start test and test out our product and I'll connect with you after this. Yeah, it's not launched yet. But it will be offline. So we're just taking all of the people who are we were user testing and with to give us feedback and ironed out all the technical kinks.
Yes, hi. I don't know if you went over this already or not. But did you guys um, incorporate your business and then start making money? Or did you start making money and then incorporate because I kind of have like, paralysis through analysis. I don't know if I should legally form my business and then start making money or should I start making money first and then legally start my business? I'm still I'm still I'm still trying to figure it out. I have bills I have to pay.
Yeah, what we did was, we incorporated our business first and we were accepted into a wanker venture incubation program. So we knew that hopefully we will be at least getting some sort of like traction and funding from there. And so we had our company incorporated first and then that just helped legally, I would say, to keep business affairs separate from anything personal, at least for me. Yeah.
More questions, please.
So I guess I don't know how applicable this question is for for these products or for your teams. But I'm wondering, and Helen, you touched on this a bit? Did you have to take people off of other projects or how did you shift resources and staff time when you were working on these and developing them?
Yeah, so for the COVID newsletter, we definitely took people off of other coverage, just generally, we took those staff writers their time was kind of designated towards COVID coverage and then sort of case by case decisions would be made by our news director and our news team about when to pull them on to other things. But yeah, we took other things off of their plate so they could focus on this stuff. However, it was still a lot of stuff and they're currently very burnt out. And that's like really important to acknowledge, I think, and that was part of the conversation for sunsetting the product as well. Again, I probably should have happened earlier, but that's just like, that's a really hard conversation to have, and we really struggle with it. So
that's, uh, yeah, it was a really important conversations to have early on and being realistic about what you're taking away from people and stuff to launch that product.
I don't on to that, because our product was slightly different in the sense that the way we were creating it, and once this is completely launched, it will just automatically keep on being produced. So that was one way in which we were looking at our product and for me in our team, which was just three of us. I did go away completely from our publication at that time, and everybody else was mainly part of the training program that we were doing and supporting and helping out with user interviews. But I was mainly focusing on this product and developing that.
Okay, it is on. So I'm coming kind of from maybe a little bit outside of the scope of this conversation, but I work in student media where it's a lot of clusters of really small type of newsrooms, and I was wondering about how to collaborate and develop new product between those kind of silos of different newsrooms in different clubs or organizations.
I think that's also a good question for like, within different departments to like, you know, being able to collaborate across different groups of people that might not just be editorial or you know, other things in that way.
take a stab at that. Um, so I think for, for us, ideally, our product team would include a marketing person, and it does not, but I think having sort of a product group, whether it's just a few people are interested in it and have that group include people from different departments that break like ideally helps break down those silos. I think I know. That is sort of like one of that's one of the goals of product thinking to be honest. In terms of how it kind of works day to day. I do think the pitch template helps with that because I'm always pulling in people from other departments into that. So like, I'm looking at the COVID one now, and it does include, it includes people from our digital team, it includes for writers to news editors, and then our marketing team is like informed so that like, we think about that in terms of how we are proposing new products, but we don't have a current team structure that really reflects that in the way it should. And I would recommend that you do that, like do as I say, not as I do.
I think that it's important to have those conversations early on too. We're talking about having that sustainability conversation, having that sunsetting conversation, getting together with those groups, those different departments, those clubs, whatever organizations early to kind of set those goals and and I think Helens point of working in a system that people are already familiar with. So whether that is slack, whether you use Asana, whether you use something else or do you be able to stay in touch with them and kind of keep projects moving along there I think are just also some good things.
I'll also just say that like we try and do that so like to launch that newsletter, my boss Kate went and like, ran to another building where the marketing team works had a conversation with them, checked in to make sure they could get it up and running. And then was like talking to our news team talking to our editor in chief basically, Mike was in charge of coming up with here's what it's going to look like and she was in charge of the politics, which is a very important person to have.
We are slightly over time right now, but I just want to make sure does anyone have one last question or anything they want to ask? No. Okay, perfect. I do have one last question. I just want to ask the panelists before we say goodbye. I want to know you talked a little bit about some of the things that you learned from your experiences with about to entre product as well as having launched products. What is one thing that you would go back and do differently from the beginning?
I think one thing that when I was talking about the Lean MVP approach, one thing that we had not considered was the technical challenges that we would face and we faced a lot of technical challenges. First of all, understanding WhatsApp API, the product development, finding a developer to work with us who was able to deliver on our needs, and that's really what caused a lot of, I would say, delay in our timeline and understanding how WhatsApp works as well. That was a huge learning experience. So when we had the MVP, we knew other people had done it. And we were like, Yeah, this should be simple. We should be able to find figure it out. But it wasn't. And if you've spoken to anybody who has worked on WhatsApp products, we have the same complaints all the time. So that was one thing when we were building out the product. I think I wished I had spoken more to people who had built out WhatsApp products also started conversations with developers who work in that so that we could have understood it.
I think an obvious one is obvious, like killing our newsletter earlier. I think I've said that like three times already. But when for Tic Tac is I think I wanted to be so referential to existing workflows exist, like making sure that we weren't pulling time from web stories from magazine that I didn't really carve out enough dedicated resources like I can carve out my own time, but it's hard to make space for other people's time. And so for example, we did an experiment with threads fairly recently, and it was a dedicated this person is going to hit threads really hard for two weeks or whatever. And I wish I had done that a little bit more with tick tock and so that we could have Yeah, so that it was easier to protect people's time and there were just more dedicated kind of contributors.
Definitely. Thank you both a lot. I really appreciate it. It's all wonderful to hear your story and everything that you've been able to accomplish so far. I want to highlight again, the tips and resources because this will be helpful in case you want to take a look at any of the things that they've mentioned. We'll make sure that it's on the q&a website too, as well. Of course plug again for any of our CUNY programs and news Product Management Certification. Make sure you guys sign up b Wonderful to see you all there. We're here to answer any questions that you have. Thank you for being engaged in this last session of OMA and I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day travel home safely. And thank you all so much.