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

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

Online News Association18min

Kelly Brennan

01:03

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.

Faye Teng

01:28

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.

Faye Teng

01:50

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.

Kelly Brennan

02:54

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.

Faye Teng

04:07

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.

Faye Teng

04:31

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.

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