1300-Wed-062321-PR-BO10-An Open-Source, Hyperlocal News Tech Stack To Serve Communities-FINAL

7:01PM Jun 21, 2021

Speakers:

Faye Teng

Kelly Brennan

Keywords:

newsletter

cms

neighborhood

hyperlocal

residents

local

community

products

kensington

survey

project

information

content

designed

faye

audience

news

advertisements

create

live demo

Thank you so much for joining the session today, we're going to explore how our hyperlocal newsletter project led us to create an open source hyper local tech stack through person first research and design. I'm Kelly Brennan. I'm the newsletter editor at the Lenfest Local Lab at the Inquirer, where I lead the editorial strategy of our newsletter project. Before joining the team, I graduated from Temple University's journalism program.

And Hi, I'm Faye Teng, the UX designer at the Lab. I lead the day-to-day user experience research, planning and designing work for product launches. And I graduated from Drexel University's Interactive Digital Media department. That's where I learned how to use a range of user experience tools and techniques.

And to give you a little bit of background about the Lenfest Local Lab, we are a news product innovation team based within the Philadelphia Inquirer, where we explore how to improve the daily user experience of our local news. And here, you can meet the rest of our small cross-disciplinary team. You can see Sarah is our Product Manager, Anna is our Special Project Editor and we also have two engineers, Ajay and Brent. And today, we will dive deep into how we design and develop an open-source custom content management system through a person-first research process. We will also discuss how we're working through hyperlocal monetization, scaling this product across communities and how we're integrating additional hyperlocal news products within this custom CMS. And later on, you are welcome to join us for a live demo of the CMS.

So first, we can take a few steps back and explain how this project began. In 2019, our team received funding from the Google News Initiative to explore how to create scalable hyperlocal newsletters that would test how to collaborate with local communities, automate and create efficiencies within the newsletter making process and how to monetize this product and make it sustainable. Since then, we've launched one local newsletter and are currently in the process of exploring how to launch a second. We're also maintaining and building other hyperlocal news products. So last summer, we launched The Hook which is a newsletter tailored to the residents of Philadelphia's Fishtown neighborhood. It's a weekly email newsletter that features original content, local neighborhood resources, and curated news and information from places like community organizations, local news outlets and local businesses. So here are just a few examples of what appear in the newsletter each week. At the top, we give a rundown of what to expect in each edition, we highlight local community meetings, take questions from subscribers and try to answer them and feature recent Zillow listings.

And prior to launching this product, we wanted to hear from the residents and use their feedback to guide us to iterate on the content of the newsletter, and also inform us what to include in the CMS. This is the four-step research process we used. And today I'll just be focusing on the first two: the Explore and Evaluate phases.

So during this exploration phase, we started out with doing in-person interviews and sending out surveys. Research really lays the foundation for product development because it's very important to get to know your audience before you are actually making something for them. So the goal for this interview and survey was to find out the general habits of our audience. For example, how they normally spent time in their neighborhood, how they access news and information, and how they feel about their current ways of seeking out neighborhood news and information. It was a short 10 to 15 question survey, and it was shared in person, pre-COVID time, and online. And there are a few types of questions we asked in the survey. We first started broad, and we just asked some demographic questions. We then asked about residents' news-reading habits, and how that fits into their lifestyle. We also asked about their general satisfaction with their current ways of seeking out neighborhood news and information, and if there's any area for improvement. And very last, just anything else we were curious about, related to this project. While we were waiting to collect survey feedback, we also did a competitive analysis, in which we looked at similar products to understand best practices and how to differentiate our own products.

The set of competitive products we looked at fell into four groups. They are: hyperlocal newsletters, neighborhood print newspapers, hyperlocal websites, and hyperlocal social media apps and sites. And the survey results allow us to build a profile of an ideal reader of the newsletter. So this profile, as you can see on the right, helps our team to stay focused on the readers' needs as we continue to iterate on the newsletter. And after we have done the competitive analysis, we also did a Post-it notes exercise to map out elements that commonly appeared in the popular neighborhood news and information products. And this landscape analysis helped us to refine our strategy and expand our thinking, we make sure we only consider additions that would be valuable to our audience. And now I will show you a few examples of how the survey feedback has informed the early wireframe of the newsletter.

So for this question, as you can see on the left, we asked the residents what they normally do when they spent time in the neighborhood. And the majority of them answered going out to eat or drink, spent time at a park or walking. So we decided to experiment with ways to incorporate restaurant and bar content and advertising in the newsletter. We also thought to spend extra time sourcing events and information about various parks and outdoor spaces in Fishtown. And here on the right, you can see the early wireframe, which is just a basic structure of what the interface would potentially look like in the newsletter.

And for this next question, we asked the residents about what Fishtown news is most interesting to them. And the majority of them answered "construction news and updates". So we thought we could tap into and automate content based on public data available about planned constructions, demolitions and developments in the neighborhood.

For this last question, we asked the residents about how they most often get neighborhood news and information. The majority of them answered "social media". So we thought we could pay close attention to the content shared on social media by neighborhood residents, businesses, elected officials and other hyper-local voices. And our editor, which is Kelly, would curate and add context to the most useful and interesting content within the newsletter.

And our content management system was then designed to meet the specific needs of the Fishtown residents who participated in our research process. And here are a few examples of how the feedback has shown up in the CMS. So on the left, you can see is where we incorporate curated neighborhood events in the newsletter. On the top right is where we automated construction and demolition data. And below is an example of how we put in social media feeds. Like this example from Twitter. And here is how all that comes from the CMS to an edition of the newsletter. So from left to right, you can see it's the event module, the construction updates module and the social media posts module. But we will go into more detail about those, like how we created those modules in the CMS, during the live demo at the end of the presentation.

So we looked at the flexibility of a custom CMS to meet the specific needs of an audience. And now we'll talk about how our CMS supports hyperlocal. monetization, some of the challenges we faced with that, and some of the things we've learned along the way. So a key part of this project is to understand how to make hyperlocal news products sustainable. And one way we started to experiment with this is by designing local image advertisements with the mindset that hyperlocal advertising is content that can help residents participate in their neighborhood, while also trying to avoid any traditional designs that may disrupt the flow of information within a newsletter. So from there, Faye designed our local ad units to have different visual cues from the rest of the newsletter, but still seamlessly flow into the curated and original content. And on the right is an example of how we can incorporate a local business advertisement in the weather module, which are both types of content that can help a resident plan their week ahead. We're also able to quickly build these ad units directly in our CMS, which you can see some of that process here. And we'll go into more detail during our live demo at the end.

During this experimentation, we have run into a few issues along the way. First, we needed to build more capacity within our team to make connections with local businesses and sell advertisements. And ultimately, some of these efforts were also challenged by the financial constraints brought on by the pandemic that have affected local businesses. But in the meantime, we've found ways to try to get back into the community. That's shown up in different ways throughout the newsletter. First, we ran free ads for local businesses. We also supported a local business and running their own digital advertisements, and subsidize some of the costs of a local park cleanup. And we feel that continuing to show up in these ways can lead to more ongoing support from a community's existing networks of information sharing. So for example, an Instagram account that's very popular in Fishtown, highlighted the newsletter, and this led to a 40 percent boost in subscriptions. And in another instance, a local artist highlighted the newsletter and directed her followers to it after we profiled her in a recent edition.

We've sent dozens of editions of this newsletter since we've launched and we're now trying to understand and experiment with ways of how to scale within this project. We've done that through building and integrating new hyperlocal news products within the CMS. So for example, we have the ability to create custom resource pages. And we've tested this product by creating a hyperlocal vaccine resource page that was based on community feedback. We're also working on creating a user submission-based events calendar, after seeing strong engagement with this content in the newsletter, and receiving feedback from residents who expressed that a feature like this would be useful to them. And so while that's happening, we're also learning about how to scale this project across communities while mitigating any harm that could come from that process. And so one way we thought about this is by asking ourselves if this newsletter project would be additive to a community.

To take a step back, when selecting a neighborhood, we gave ourselves tentative criteria to look for, which was the presence of local community organizations hyperlocal, media outlets and news coverage and accessible and actionable public data. And so we use this baseline criteria to explore Fishtown prior to launching and we used it for finding another neighborhood as well. And so from there, we began looking into two neighborhoods, West Kensington and Fairhill, which you can see photos of up on the screen. And in order to mitigate any harm, we decided to reach out to community stakeholders in these neighborhoods and ask them if our project would be additive to the work they're already doing in West Kensington and Fairhill. And so, following these conversations, we felt that there were ways that we could be additive. For example, we feel like we can amplify some of the critical and essential resources from these community stakeholders and also provide additional bilingual information to the neighborhood Spanish-speaking population. And also will continue to closely collaborate with the stakeholders throughout this project.

And currently, we're in the exploration phase of our four-step research process. And we are collecting feedback from residents from West Kensington and Fairhill, but not other all neighborhoods are the same. So the way we did the outreach in the explorer phase in Fishtown cannot be done the exact same way in West Kensington and Fairhill. There were just a couple of challenges we encountered. So for example, with a pandemic, in-person interviews were very difficult to conduct, and when we send our online surveys through targeted Facebook ads and on social media, we received low engagement. We also learned from our collaborators that residents of these two neighborhoods were over-surveyed. And the process to send out the survey also took longer because we wanted to make sure that our survey and any ads were translated into Spanish because West Kensington and Fairhill has a large Spanish-speaking population. It's very important to support those needs of our audience during the research phase ahead of time.

And while we learned about scaling, we also found that we could provide a more specific resource for West Kensington and Fairhill residents before launching a newsletter. And so in the past few months, organizations like Epicenter NYC and the Oaklandside have been providing communities with actionable vaccine information. And in Philadelphia, and in these neighborhoods specifically, there were disproportionately low vaccination rates, and also at the time of the opening of a mass vaccination clinic in North Philadelphia. And so with all of this in mind, we decided to create a bilingual texting service for West Kensington and Fairhill residents to provide actionable updates about the clinic and other information about getting vaccinated in an accessible and efficient format, like texting. And so through this service, we learned a lot about how to distill complicated information, in this case, the city's vaccine distribution. But we also learned about how to collaborate with community organizations and how to set up information-sharing workflows. And we gained a lot of insights about Spanish language translation. And so we're able to take these insights and incorporate them into the neighborhood newsletter for West Kensington and Fairhill. And so we spent over a year on this newsletter project, and here are just some of the things that we've learned so far.

One of the things we learned is use research to guide every aspect of your work, but keeping mind to be flexible with the process.

And to always acknowledge and support the existing networks of information-sharing that exists within communities that you may want to work within, and to ask yourself if your product is going to be additive to these networks.

And if possible, find ways to financially support community organizations, local events, and local businesses.

And just to keep an eye out for additional services for your audience that you may be able to provide. This kind of speaks this idea of continually showing up for your audience. In our case, it was through custom resource pages and texting service and bilingual information. But that can show up in many different ways for your audiences. And so that is the end of our presentation. But we are going to be moving to a live demo of our CMS where we're going to show the ins and outs of that platform and how it was designed and how we use it each week. And I'll pull up a link that will be on the screen in a second. But thank you so much for joining. I'm Kelly Brennan.

And I'm Faye Teng. If you have any questions or want to chat, please feel free to contact us.