Future Tools for Journalists

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 20th, 2015

16-20 February

Another week has passed by, and we all agreed this week went so quickly! On Monday, we started with a workshop ‘Define Goals & Intentions’ from Charlie Mulholland. We found this one of the most inspiring and useful workshops so far. Especially the brainstorm session was a real eye-opener. First of all, we learned the correct way how to use sticky notes: you should always tear them from left to right instead from down to up. When you do it this way, the sticky note won’t curl up. We started the workshop with defining our problem in one sentence. Then, we had to write down the 5 W’s and 1 H: Who, What, Where, When, Why and How. By doing this, we realized that we couldn’t answer the question why our problem needs to be solved yet in one concrete sentence. This is an important insight and we will do some research in the coming weeks to see if we are able to answer this challenging question. Afterwards, we did a brainstorm session where we all had to come up with different stakeholders, which we categorized in four different groups: project, users, third parties and future. After the workshop, we had to prepare lunch with our team. It was nice to prepare a lunch all together for a big group of people. After lunch, we had a meeting with Margreet, which was about Ideation and Sprint Planning. This meeting was very important, because we had to organize our Scrum Board in order to get a clear overview of all the different User Stories. The Friday before, we ended the week with the meeting with Alexander about the User Stories, so it was quite important for our team to really know how SCRUM works.

On Tuesday, we started working according these user stories, and our team worked like a Well-Oiled Machine, doing tasks for the first three user stories during the whole day. On Wednesday, we started the day with a workshop Visual Thinking from Agnes and Ilaria. Afterwards, we had a meeting with Margreet and Felipe, where we discussed everything we did so far. For example, we got some great feedback for interviewing journalists, adapted some of the questions and talked about general thing concerning Scrum. On Thursday, we worked on the User Stories and send all the relevant information to the Persgroep. We also got in touch with a Journalism teacher at the University of Amsterdam. Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to talk to us next week. He did give us some very interesting information that we are researching right now. Next week, we’ll hopefully have interviews with different journalists from the Persgroep and finish some user stories.

medialab.publishingtools@gmail.com

https://twitter.com/future_tools

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.