On April Fool’s day, we arranged a meeting with Frank and Petra from De Persgroep (no joke!). The goal of this meeting was to come up with several possibilities for other prototypes. In order to have a good meeting, we came up with different strategies to do a good brainstorm session. Since we only had an hour, we divided the brainstorm session into two parts. The first part was about the view on the future of journalism in general. Everyone had to write down as many ideas as possible about the future of journalism on sticky notes in just ten minutes. After ten minutes, everyone told their ideas individually and we tried to organize everything in different general themes. As it turned out, we all organized our ideas according to six bigger themes: stories, reader, future, personalization, interaction and format. You can see our ideas below:
- Stories
- Reader
- Personalization
- Interaction
- Future
- Format
After we all did this, we started the second phase of the brainstorm session. Here’ we planned doing a brainstorm session according to the 635 method, which is more related to brain writing. You can read more about this here. During this session, everybody came up with three ideas in three minutes. After these minutes, everyone passed their paper to the person sitting on their left side. By doing so, all the ideas could be developed because every single person could take a look at it. We listed some of the most important ideas below:
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Stories will adapt to the readers mood, or to the amount of time they have, their preferences, location etc. “Making the article smart”: the tool knows which topics you’re interested in by learning your behavior. This could also mean the tool selects the content based on your mood, health and surroundings.
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The journalist of the future will use the crowd to get his information. By working like this, he or she will have a closer relationship with the audience. The crowd will also provide the journalist with expert info and let him/her know what topics are hot and interesting. In this way, readers can become experts on topics and provide the journalist with information about this expertise.
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There should be an online dashboard that’s real time to see the success of a story. In this dashboard, there are tools integrated that help optimizing the success.
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A tool should give direct feedback to the journalist while writing it, so that the story can become more successful. Criteria for what makes an article successful will be defined in it.
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A tool should automatically tag all the content that is needed in order to write a story, like tweets, interviews, video, audio etc. These tags dynamically write the story, making the journalist a capturer and a organizer of information. In this tool, social media like tweetdeck are included.
These are the most important outcomes of the brainstorm session. Of course, there were many more ideas, which we will all keep in mind.