By annezwaan May 19th, 2015

The Business Model Canvas Workshop

On the 13th of May, we had a workshop business model Canvas. The designers of our team, Nikki and Michelle, already worked with this model before, but me and Javier did not. Before the workshop started, we all agreed it would be a good idea to think about the future possibilities of the tool we are currently developing. At the beginning of the workshop, we all had to define our passion, our talent and what makes us angry. This had to be done individually. After we defined it, the instructor told us the most important thing in developing a business model, is passion. When running a company, passion is the most important factor. After we all came up with a sentence where these elements were put together (with my passion for X and my talent for Y I want to fix what makes you angry), we were introduced to the business model canvas via the following YouTube video:

In this video, there clearly explained how the business model canvas works and how all the different parts of the business model canvas are connected. Therefore, it’s very important to really think the whole model through. To start with this, we were given the assignment to think about different things for the customer job, the gains and the pains. As an example of the customer job, the instructor told us about hanging a painting. Someone would do it to have the final goal of enjoying the painting. Like this, it would go even further than a gain. We listed those three elements like this:

Customer Job:

To simplify the working method of the future journalist
To have the work of the future journalist done faster
To give the journalist of the future more impact on society

Gains:

To give the future journalist a more organized workspace
To extend the lifespan of a story/an article
To let knowledge be exchanged more easily

Pains:

The journalist of the future would be restricted to 1 platform
The platform that the journalist of the future would use, would just be online
There could be a safety issue about a ‘safe way’ of exchanging knowledge

Our Business Model Canvas

When we had the workshop last week, we were making use of sticky notes. This was really helpful, because it gave us a great overview of all the different parts of the business model. Furthermore, it gave us the possibility to move the stickies around, preventing us from making mistakes. Here, I’ll list the most important stickies for each box within the business model canvas.

Key partners:

De Persgroep
Journalism Schools
Future journalists
Freelance Journalists

Key Activities:

Design an easy and understandable user-interface
Keep in touch with users to define their needs
Be innovative

Key Resources:

Innovation manager
New Media Researcher
Programmer
UI and UX designers

Value Propositions:

A more organized workspace
Extend the lifespan of an article
Easy knowledge exchange
To combine innovation and usability
Easy usability
Higher productivity

Customer Relationships:

Automated User Feedback
Self Service

Channels:

Distribute within a news company
Distribute via networks of key partners
Sales
If successful: distribute it on the web for bloggers or citizen journalists

Customer Segments:

Social media marketeers
The independent future journalist
Book writers
Translators
Future news companies
Journalism students
Future citizen journalists
Any future blogger

Conclusions

At the end of the Business Model Canvas Workshop, our instructor told us that everything we had done so far, was useless. We all looked strangely at each other, but when he explained his remark, it made sense: when creating a business model, you should know all the things you write down for sure. For now, everything we did were ‘just’ assumptions and would therefore need to be confirmed. Despite of the fact we don’t have so much time left, we want to see whether we can determine how our business model would look like in the future. Therefore, we’ll keep adapting our business model in the future.

By annezwaan May 13th, 2015

Six weeks left..

Hi there! It’s amazing how quickly the time is passing by.. We are already approaching the end of the project, which doesn’t feel very realistic to be honest. Last Monday, we did the sprint planning of sprint 5. Below, you can see the user stories that we came up with:

User stories sprint 5

It seemed a good idea to me to enhance a bit more on these separate user stories.

User Story #1

Our first user story is about the three different use cases. By using these use cases, we want to explain the use of our interactive dashboard to others. Our designers Nikki and Michelle started doing this on that same day, and came up with three different use cases that would become the basis of the main navigation of our tool. The first use case is arranging a digital workspace, the second one is collecting and organizing information and the last one is to write and publish an article.

User Story #2

The second user story was about the adapting of the existing wireframes, based on the user cases. Like this, we could easily start designing the final design of our dashboard. Adapting the wireframes would be done here according to the previous user story, the use case.

User Story #3

For the third user story, we want to create a design document which we can build upon. This design manual can be seen as a brand manual where guidelines are being written down. This will help us designing the final version of our tool.

User Story #4

User Story 4 is about the first design of the interactive dashboard. In this sprint, that’s the sprint before the last one, we want our dashboard to have a great design.

User Story #5

The fifth user story is about translating the design of our prototype to a first version of HTML. Like this, we can translate our design into a clickable prototype. In this sprint and in the next sprint, we want to see to what extend we can translate our design into a programmed prototype.

User Story #6

In User Story 6, we want to come up with more modules. In these modules, our programmer Javier tries to work out as many innovative techniques as possible, what would e.g. help extend the lifespan of an article. We selected 15 different modules and we will work out a selection of them.

User Story #7

User Story 7 was about the scientific paper, but we decided, considering the time, not to do it and spend our time to the previous user stories.

This sprint lasts a few days shorter due to the ascension day, but at the end of the sprint we’ll write another blogpost about the progress.

By annezwaan April 16th, 2015

Halfway..

Almost two weeks have passed by and we’re at the end of the third sprint. This means we’re halfway our MediaLAB project. It’s unbelievable how fast this sprint went.. Obviously one of the reasons for this was the Easter break, which was a 4-days lasting holiday. Another reason it went by so fast, is the fact that we were so busy developing our second prototype: the interactive dashboard! Last sprint, we ended with the interactive timeline. During the peer pitch, we got some great feedback from our peers which we translated into a SWOT-analysis, which you can see below:

SWOT Analysis Peer Pitch 2

After the peer pitch, we discussed the feedback and decided there should be an interactive tool in the backend too, which would focus more on the journalist itself. In this tool, the journalist would see the statistics of the written stories, see a social feed and would have the possibility to collaborate with both other journalists and readers. After some small brainstorming, we came up with the idea of an interactive dashboard.

This became the starting point of Sprint 3. During the sprint planning, we adapted the user stories of this sprint to this focus: designing an environment for the future journalist in the form of an interactive dashboard. Furthermore, we wanted to do a brainstorm session with our assigners from the Persgroep, Frank and Petra. We also wanted to create a clickable prototype for this sprint. Altogether, our user stories for this sprint looked like this:

User Stories Sprint 3

On April first, we had the brainstorm session at De Persgroep, which you can read more about here. After it, we started on the wireframes of the dashboard, which we made in the Invision tool. Below you can see some examples of it:

Dashboard – Statistics

Dashboard – Profile

Dashboard – Front Page

On Wednesday the 15th of april, we had the third peer pitch. We also did a SWOT analysis of these results:

SWOT Analysis Peer Pitch 3

The day after, on april 16th, we had the Sprint Review with de Persgroep at MediaLAB. After it, we did a retrospectives session. Next Monday we’ll start planning sprint 4! Keep you posted!

By annezwaan April 2nd, 2015

Brainstorming!!!

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:

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

By michellenagel April 2nd, 2015

Cross Media Café

On the 31st of march Nikki and I (Michelle) went to the Cross Media Cafe organized by iMMovator at Studio 4 in Hilversum Mediapark. There were several lectures from people who have an important role in the media business. These lectures were about the future of journalism so that really fits within our project!

This was the overview of the program:

Attendees

Marion Appel (GfK)
Lara Ankersmit (NOS)
Joost Bon (Nu.nl)
Sjoerd Raaijmakers (Vice Media)
Mir Wermuth (Stimuleringsfonds voor de Journalistiek)
Paul Valk (TNO)
Wilko van Iperen (KRO-NCRV)
Jeroen Verkroost (De Persgroep)
Jelle Kamsma (Local Focus)
Jeroen Zanen (Crowdynews)
Jorn de Vries (Flitsmeister)

Exhibition Beeld & Geluid

We also visited an exhibition at Beeld & Geluid beforehand. This exhibition was about 4 famous stories that were shown at the 8 o’clock news of the NOS. On a timeline they showed the development of the story on all kinds of media platforms like social media and other tv programs like RTL late night and De Wereld Draait Door. They recently interviewed the main characters of the stories again to look back at the events. One example is the story of Mauro, a young adult that had to leave the country because he didn’t have a Dutch nationality. Because of all the media attention he got, his goal to receive a visa became much easier.

Our insights

After the lectures we had the following insights:

News should be more relevant and needs more perspective.

Bring the right news to the right people.

The interface matters. (Like Netflix)

Your can finish a newspaper like a book, but you can never finish news on the internet.

Applications should be based on location, time and/or even things like the weather.

Branded content will be the future.

Other interesting demos we saw:

Local focus

A data visualization platform for journalists. (Used by the Volkskrant)

CrowdyNews

Real-time social media feeds that you can use to put in your article.

Journee

A public digital diary for investigative journalists where they can show their progress to the audience until the article is finished.

Pagefact

A plug-in for journalists that checks the reliability of internet sources.

It was a very interesting day and we’ve got lots of new inspiration and insights to use in our project!

By annezwaan March 19th, 2015

The 6th week already!

16-20 March

This week went by very fast! Our team is currently in such a good flow of energy, that time flies. This monday, we started wrapping up all the user stories that were already finished. We also decided this week would be important for Javier, the programmer of our team. We agreed he would use this week to program our prototype (the interactive timeline). Since he was at a conference in Hannover last monday, he was happy to finally start doing what he’s really good at: coding! For the first time, we’ve seen Javier in his natural habitat: focussing on 0’s and 1’s practically the whole day. We helped him by feeding him tea and fruit (yeah, he’s a healthy Spanish boy who doesn’t like coffee and really likes fruit). We’re very happy to see the great progress he makes on the prototype!

On tuesday, we met Margreet again, who wasn’t there last week because she went on a holiday. We were happy to tell her the progress we made in the week before. Luckily, Miriam and Felipe provided us with some great feedback last week, so despite the fact we missed Margreet around us, the quality of our work was able to stay at the same level as before. On wednesday morning, we had a translate session with Margreet. We showed Margreet all the visualisations of the user stories that were both finished as in progress. She provided us with some great feedback, which we adapted that afternoon. An important insight was that we should always provide a visualisation with a good introduction or context, because just a visualisation of something cannot explain why something is visualised or what the motivations of it are. You can see some examples below:

Story/Article

Stakeholders Map

Michelle and Anne also did a cross-case analysis for user story 1 and 3, which are about the interviews with both the professional journalists as the journalism students. One of the windows at MediaLAB was covered by sticky notes that day:

Cross-Case Analysis – tools

Cross-Case Analysis – sticky notes everywhere…

On Thursday, Javier spent the whole day programming. At the end of the day, he looked like this:

Javier programming..

A few hours later…

Michelle en Nikki did some great job in making visualizations of all the user stories. Michelle spent a lot of time on visualizing the outcomes of the cross-case analysis, about which we can say we are quite proud of!

Cross-case Analysis

Michelle designing the visualization of the cross-case analysis

Nikki finished the personas of both the contemporary investigative journalist as the future investigative journalist, which helps us to better understand our user. She did a great job!

Persona contemporary investigative journalist

Persona future investigative journalist

Anne spent time on wrapping up all the different stories in the insights document, from which you can see a preview below:

Insights Sprint 2 preview

Next week, we’ll focus on the peer pitch on Wednesday, where we’ll pitch our first prototype to our peers. On friday, we’ll have a meeting with the Persgroep again, where we will show them all the outcomes of this sprint and of course the prototype too. Also, our team has to prepare lunch on monday, so we can use our creativity on a different level than connected to the future of journalism. We’ll keep you up-to-date!

By annezwaan March 16th, 2015

The most essential week so far

Last Monday, we started the week with an ideation and sprint planning session. Together, we spent the whole morning thinking about what we would like to do during this sprint:

Sprint Planning

The week went by so fast, so that’s why we decided to write the blog post on the beginning of this week (the week of march 16th). After a few hours, we came up with ten different user stories, which we visualized below:

User Stories Sprint 2

We decided to continue the user stories that were about getting to know the professional journalist. Furthermore, we also wanted to interview the future journalist, that would be the students who are going to journalism schools right now. We have to create something for the future journalist, so talking to journalism students was essential in our point of view.

The main goal of Sprint 2 is to find a clear focus. At the end of this sprint, we want to be able to narrow down our research question (which is still quite big at the moment).

Another point of focus was to make a stakeholders map. In the sprint review with the Persgroep, Miriam advised us doing this, because it would give us a clear overview of all the stakeholders. This is the result:

Stakeholders Map (1)

Stakeholders Map (2)

On Tuesday morning, we discussed everything considering sprint 2 with Miriam. She advised us to extend the stakeholders map a bit more, what we did that afternoon. Furthermore, we decided it would be useful for us to create a document where we could write down the most important insights from this sprint. Here, we would ask ourselves these questions:

What were the goals?
What did we do?
What did we learn?
What didn’t we do?
What will we do?

By doing this and asking ourselves these questions, we have to ask ourselves ‘why’ more often, what is one of the main objectives of this sprint. The ‘why-question’ isn’t always an easy question, but it is a relevant question though. Especially Javier was very good in asking ‘why’ during our sprint planning session.

Meeting with Miriam

Interview with Stan

Tuesday, we had an interview with Stan. He’s a 20 year old New Media student who currently writes articles for Spunk and the Volkskrant. It was remarkable he notices the same as other people we had spoken so far:

There’s not a good search function/tool yet to search for articles. I myself lost an article once on the internet. But the internet also expands the lifespan. Paper articles you lose easier or just throw away. You can also recycle your own articles by using pieces of it in another new article.

According to him, the future of journalism is about digital storytelling:

Digital storytelling with interaction is really beautiful. It would be really cool if this would be better understandable and doable for the normal journalist.

We asked Stan about the citizen journalist too, because we want to know if we should focus on the citizen journalist or on the professional journalist. According to him, the citizen journalist won’t substitute the professional journalist. We decided to implement these kind of questions to our list, so we can come up with a clear conclusion about this after this sprint.

Ideation Workshop

On Wednesday morning, we had an ideation workshop with Charlie. This turned out to be a big brainstorm session about the existing prototype. Because we don’t have a prototype yet, we thought it would be quite hard. But what we did was very useful, because it made us think about the kind of prototype we would like to see. At the end of the brainstorm session, we came up with the idea of designing an interactive timeline, where information would be organized for the professional journalist, Twitter feeds would be visible and the lifespan of an article would be extended. Here you can see photos of that little eureka moment:

Ideation with Charlie

Thursday and Friday

Thursday and Friday were very productive days. Because Friday is usually the graduation day within our team (both Nikki, Michelle and I (Anne) are writing their thesis) and Anne has a deadline this week, we decided I would work on my thesis at home so she could attend the meeting at the AD on Friday. Petra invited us to come over to Rotterdam to talk to 4 journalists and see the editorial office of ‘Het Algemeen Dagblad’, the second biggest newspaper in The Netherlands. On Thursday, Nikki, Michelle en Javier went to the Persgroep to talk to the well-known dutch journalist Huib Modderkolk. This was a very inspiring meeting, where Huib responded positively on our idea of the interactive timeline. Furthermore, the idea of designing a tool for the citizen journalist was discarded then, which really helped us finding a clear focus.

On Friday, Michelle and I went to Rotterdam to see the editorial office of the AD. We both really liked seeing the working environment here. Petra planned four interviews for us, which was very useful (and intense at the same time!). As you can imagine, we couldn’t take any pictures there, but we did make a lot of notes from the conversations we had with four very interesting journalists. We were able to talk to two freelance journalists who went to the ‘Hogeschool for Journalistiek’ in Utrecht. The outcome from this was very useful for User Story 3.

We were also able to talk to Jeroen de Vreede, a datajournalist at AD. We thought we would interview him, but he just started telling everything he thought that could be useful for us, implicitly answering all our questions. For him, it was also very important for the future journalist to have a system where knowledge could be changed within a big company like AD. This is something we could easily implement in our prototype.

This Week

To conclude, last week was an essential week for our process. We collected so much information that we will process this week. By the end of this week, we’ll hopefully have (either paper or clickable) prototype which we can present to the Persgroep. It feels really good that we are getting more clear ideas about what we will develop in the coming 15 weeks.

By michellenagel March 6th, 2015

The end of sprint 1

Hi there people! It’s time again for our weekly blog update. With this week: the end of sprint 1. Yes you heard that right, this week sprint 1 will be finished. Time flies when you’re having fun!

We started the week with a really interesting interview Madeline Crowell. She’s a 23-years-old freelance journalist. We asked her questions about her vision on journalism of this day and age and her vision of the future.

She finds freelance journalism very competitive. The younger people have to fight for their articles to be published while the somewhat older people are higher up in the hierarchy. The positive side of freelance journalism is that she can write about anything she likes, so no restrictions.

The tools she uses are mainly hands on approaches like interviews and recording people. She does use the internet but not social media like Twitter or Facebook. “There’s a lot of rubbish on the internet” she says. “You have to be really careful while looking for information. But that also counts for interviews. You generally have to trust the ones you’re interviewing. It’s hard to make sure it’s reliable.”

We also asked how her ideal future tool for the journalist would look like. “Something that exactly keeps you up to date, but is has to be organized. Some kind of database of e-mails for editors, or to get in contact with someone. That would really help me with my work.”

On Wednesday we had our first Peer-Pitch. All the MediaLAB groups presented their current progress in their project. We of course also did this and we got some great feedback from the other groups and coaches! We translated this feedback into a SWOT Analysis with our strenghts, weaknesses and opportunities.

At the end of this sprint we of course also had a meeting with de Persgroep. This meeting was similar to the Peer-Pitch, namely to let them see our progress so far. The most important points in this meeting were:

What is the lifespan of an article anyway? How is it determined? How do the journalist and reader see this?
Keep interviewing journalists!
Make a clear conclusion after every sprint. What did we do and what did we learn/not learn?

Last on the agenda was the sprint retrospective with our Scrum Master Alexander. We reviewed our first sprint with the so called “Start, Stop, Continue” method. We each thought of things we should start, stop or continue in our next sprint, put them on sticky notes and categorized them.

We now have a clear view on how to start with the next sprint! Since sprint 1 is now finished we will throw a little party and treat ourselves to some beers. Stay tuned for next week when we will start making user stories for sprint 2! See you all next blog update!

Nikki 🙂

By michellenagel February 26th, 2015

First meeting with a real journalist

This week we had a translate session with Margreet where we showed the work that we already finished. We mainly focused on the interaction between the reader and the journalist by observing several well known journalists. We made moodboards as a prototype and a document with our findings.

Our main conclusion was that they all use similar tools, but not really innovative ones. They answer other people via their blog, facebook and Twitter, but it didn’t feel like they took the most profit out of it.

Meanwhile when we were waiting for an answer from de Persgroep, we also searched for interesting elements of journalism tools. We plan to make clickable prototypes of those elements and maybe combine them with each other. This part isn’t our main priority though but still very interesting to look out for because we can use this in a later stage.

Also, we were really focused on the interviews we were hoping to get this week. The exciting news that we got from de Persgroep was that they could provide us with an interview and a chance to attend the daily meetings with the Volkskrant. It was extremely interesting to watch how the journalists and chiefs provided each other with different subjects and feedback with some jokes in between.

Afterwards we had one interview with a data journalist named Sybren Kooistra. At first we hoped that we could speak with some more journalists but he already provided us with so much insights. His vision about future journalism and tools was very fascinating.

We took all of these insights with us when we got back to MediaLAB and there we came up with something we really like to focus on which is that;

We would like to create a tool that connects both the citizen journalists and the professional journalists so that they can join forces together to create amazing high quality articles which are not focused on deadlines.

Of course this not definite but it’s something we could take a look at.

After the interview we of course wrote down all of our notes and did some work on the user stories. We will present these at the peer session and the next meeting with the Persgroep.

See you next week folks!

By annezwaan February 13th, 2015

First Blog Post (4-15 February)

Hi there! This is our first blog post. A week ago, we started on this new adventure at MediaLAB Amsterdam. On wednesday february 4th the kickoff week started and we were introduced to each other and our team coach Margreet. Our team consists of Michelle and Nikki, our Dutch designers. Then there’s our Spanish programmer Javier and our Dutch researcher Anne. Together we form a interdisciplinary and international team:

The Team

Kick-Off!

At the beginning of the kick-off day, we all presented our Pecha Kucha presentations, where we had to present our personality, portfolio and presentation. We also had a campus tour, signed the contracts and had pizza and drinks in the evening. The day after, we learned everything about de MediaLAB approach and two alumni came by to tell about their experience at MediaLAB. After lunch, we had our first introduction to SCRUM in a workshop with Alexander. In the afternoon, we started working on sprint 0, that was about the User Scene. Also on friday, we spent the whole day working on the user scene. We also met Miriam from the Institute of Network Cultures, who will help us reviewing our work in the next 5 months.

Second Week

Last monday, February 9th, we started with a Tinkering Workshop from Tamara and Loes. After that, we worked on Sprint 0 and recorded the voice-over of our User Scene in a studio that we reserved.

On tuesday, our designers Nikki and Michelle put some great effort in the animation of the User Scene that we came up with together. Even though the final video was uploaded on 3.30 AM that night, we are really happy with the result. You can see it below:

On Thursday we went to Freepressunlimited, an organization that fights for freedom of speech in war zones and conflict areas. We showed our User Scene and learnt that freedom of speech cannot be taken for granted. On Friday, we had our first meeting with the Persgroep. This was very useful, we discussed all our questions and got answers on a lot of them. We are free to design a tool that fits their needs, which is quite liberating to us, because they won’t restrict us at all! We can’t wait to start our brainstorming sessions about this. On friday afternoon, we created some more user stories and discussed them with Alexander. This gave us a better understanding of using SCRUM.

Lessons Learnt

One of the most important lessons that we learned last week, is that even though you don’t know each other, you can become a great team in a very short time. In a short period, we already gained so many more insights in our subject, which is quite big. We are very excited to keep working on this project the next 5 months and learn much more about this very interesting topic.

: Team working

: SCRUM Board

: Team

: Tinkering Workshop

CREATING TOMORROW

Future Tools for Journalists

On this blog we'll post everything we have done and what's on our mind.

Team

Commissioner:

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