Lessons in experience design for news media

September/October 2013

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The premier resource for insight, analysis and technology integration in newspaper, magazine, digital and hybrid production.

Newspaper executives turned out for Graphic Arts Show Co.’s Print 13 show.

Our complete coverage of the conference begins on page 5.

Below from left to right: Newspaper and vendor representatives Gary Hughes, Todd Socia, Terry L. Hayes, Nicholas D’Andrea, Mike Connors, Robert Barnes, Dario DiMare, Jurgen Gruber, David Stenstrom and Jason Birket were among the attendees at Print 13.

Execs share methods to bolster print

BY TARA MCMEEKIN EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

CHICAGO — Four newspaper executives shared details of their initiatives to bolster the printed product during News & Tech’s panel session, “Keeping Print Strong in Your Newspaper Brand” during the Print 13 show.

“Disruption in our industry has definitely caused us to rethink how we approach print,” Tribune Media Group’s Senior Vice President of Marketing and Targeted Media Joseph Schiltz told attendees. “Our goal is to innovate in the print product space as much and as long as possible.”

N&T session continued on page 17

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Lessons in experience design for news media

BY BRIE LOGSDON & KERRY J. NORTHRUP SPECIAL TO NEWS & TECH

In today’s world — where content comes in torrents, technology is always changing and the only scarce resource is the attention span of a Millennial multitasker — what counts in successful news media is engagement.

New studies show that it is not about attracting millions of unique visitors or thousands of social media followers. You can’t

simply count on the percentage of market households that had your channel on in the background while doing other things, or the number of print copies rolling off the press that don’t get read. In this era of Big Data, big numbers really don’t mean as much.

Now, the total time most people spend experiencing a piece of news is measured in partial minutes and seconds. In those seconds, for the most part, people don’t really commit anything of themselves to the experience because the experience hasn’t engaged them. And as we know, it is the experience that matters, that differentiates.

26 September/October 2013

In an age where people can find the same news and information anywhere, the experience of how they get it and engage with it can be the difference in whether or not they remember and, ultimately, value it. With that said, it is worth consulting some experts at designing experiences around content to see what we in the news business can learn about doing a better job of engaging our public.

Consider museums.

There are significant commonalities between what museums and news media do. Both have content and audiences.

Both seek to connect their audiences with their content while making enough money to pay for the activity.

On the other hand, it is interesting to note how differently museums and news media approach that connection goal, and how differently they relate to their audiences.

Museums consider their audience members as patrons. They focus on giving them something significant for their time and attention: an experience of culture, knowledge and information.

Commercial news organizations do not generally regard their readers, viewers or users as patrons as much as a primary business commodity to be packaged

and sold to advertisers. That’s on the business side.

On the journalistic side, we are similarly committed to the culture, knowledge and information values of our content. But even there, most traditionally trained journalists put the integrity of the story above everything else, including the public. It’s even built into our ethics. As for value, enlightenment via the story is considered its own reward — the ultimate public benefit.

Protecting integrity Museums, one has to know, are just as staunchly protective of the integrity of their content: the art and artifacts entrusted to their keeping and exhibit. Yet museums put their emphasis on how successfully people experience and engage with the content, not just that they get access to it.

That emphasis on the experience doesn’t seem to hurt the content or the museum. Museum attendance worldwide has increased every year for the past four or five, according to an annual survey by The Art Newspaper, while newspaper readership and network TV news viewership have steadily declined over the same period.

So what if you approached a news story like a museum exhibit? In fact, what if you made a news story into a museum-like experience so that people could physically, as well as informationally explore, study and absorb it, with the goal of generating a much higher level of engagement than a typical news story? How would that work exactly?

That’s what the news project “Inside Confucius,” from the Western Kentucky University School of Journalism and Broadcasting’s entrepreneurial startup iMedia, set

out to explore over eight months from late 2012 into early 2013.

Journalistically, Inside Confucius is an investigation of the educational, financial and political influences of the Chinese government’s Confucius Institute, which places thousands of teachers in local classrooms all over the world to teach Mandarin and spread Chinese culture to schoolchildren.

The story is a powerful draw from the standpoints of children, educational standards and funding, politics and soft power, human interest in the visiting teachers, global interest in understanding China and the complexities of international relations.

Attractive, interactive Technologically, Inside Confucius was designed from the start to be experienced by people through a combination of highly attractive and interactive storytelling formats. These include artistically inspired infographic posters, augmented reality video, mobile and tablet adaptiveness and interactive long-form narrative styles. It has also employed data visualization, crowd-sourcing and the latest social media techniques. The goal of all this has been to generate a higher level of engagement than a traditionally told story.

Then experientially, augmenting its various digital, mobile, print and video existences, Inside Confucius created a physical experience based on museum experience design techniques of exhibition display and lighting, tiered signage, synchronized literature, visual and tactile interactivity and promotion. It is a news story in the form of an experience.

Here again, commonalities between museums and news media became apparent as the design process for the exhibit space News & Tech

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turned out to mirror the layout process for a magazine article. The opening wall with its huge graphics, Chinese lettering and summary text, works like the cover page.

Nine infographic panels, mounted and illuminated as art on the walls, are the sections of the article, each focusing on educational issues, world expansion of the program, political influence, student interactions, school impacts, the teachers’ stories and other angles.

Next to each panel, like the provenance placard in a museum, are storyboards with background information acting like article sidebars and breakouts. And the process of implementing augmented-reality technology from Dutch company Layar, a partner in the project, was the same as the process of integrating multimedia into an article.

The process of putting together Inside Confucius easily matched the level of complexity and work required of any major editorial exposé.

Dozens of people blending a wide

range of skills were required. Most were Western iMedia-trained fusion journalists (see more details at the responsive mobile site at wkujournalism.com/insideconfucius).

The process identified five best practices that news media can borrow from museums and other experienced designers to improve engagement around news content.

1. Plan the experience, not just the story — The Manual of Museum Exhibitions lists five phases in the design process. The first is creating an interpretive plan that considers the “intended visitor experience” as much as any piece of content. The comparable step in a news organization is making engagement part of the story budget.

2. Put a storyteller in charge, not a techie — Museums don’t collect art then turn it over to their IT departments to create the experience for visitors. News organizations shouldn’t just hand engagement responsibility over to digital desks.

It’s not about the technology or even just the content. It all has to play together to make for a truly engaging experience.

3. Give power to the people — Once you’re inside a museum exhibit, you’re in charge of where you go and what you look at. Each choice you make invests you in the environment. To be like a museum exhibit, then, a news experience should be non-linear and provide multiple points of entry.

4. Use tiered content instead of inverted pyramid — The placards next to a piece of museum art usually start with just one or two lines of title and label at the top, followed by a brief conversational paragraph, followed by a longer section of expert detail. This tiered content model allows people to decide how deeply they want to dive into the information.

5. Give people a real experience — The science of human motiva-

tion and psychology lies behind experience design. Museum exhibit designers are often schooled in these arts. News managers usually aren’t. In layman’s terms, though, it’s simple: It isn’t much of an experience if it’s something they do all the time. To be worthy of the term, a news experience needs to be special somehow.

Increase engagement The metric for success in this effort is increasing your engagement coefficient.

Calculate your coefficient by first tracking the number of people who actually do something with your story rather than just giving it a glance and moving on. Then divide that by the total number of people who touched the content in any way. That’s the story’s engagement coefficient.

You would have a coefficient of 1 in a perfect world. The more the coefficient reduces down to some Design lessons continued on page 28

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September/October 2013 27

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Indiana daily moves to Puzzleflow

BY TARA MCMEEKIN EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

The Tribune Star in Terre Haute, Ind., is among the latest Community Newspaper Holdings Inc. papers to roll out Puzzleflow workflow software as the publisher gets closer to completing its groupwide deployment of the app.

CNHI first began installing Puzzleflow at its properties in 2009, in tandem with a conversion of 21 of its newspapers to CTP (see News & Tech, September 2009).

In the Tribune Star’s case, the move became necessary as the paper — something of a regional printing hub for CNHI — began taking on more printing and needed to automate imposition. “We were using an older

Panther page imposition system and as we started taking on more printing we had a need to develop a workflow to automate the process,� Brian Lane, production director, told News & Tech.

The paper wanted to avoid having to manually open jobs from clients to check for errors, and allow better access to their own print jobs. “We needed a way to let them check jobs and put responsibility back on the client for approval,�

Lane said. “It also frees up our resources that no longer have to spend time checking pages and putting them through.�

Among the CNHI papers the

Tribune Star prints are the twiceweekly Hendricks County Flyer in Avon and Illinois papers The Effingham Daily News and The Commercial-News in Danville. It also prints a handful of commercial jobs.

Lane said the paper is producing 120 pages each night and the publisher’s prepress workflow can be scaled up as necessary. “It applies prepress fixes and then makes pages available to the pairing software,� which consists of a Harlequin RIP and page-pairing software built into Puzzleflow, he said.

The Tribune Star produces plates on a FasTrack platesetter

from alfa CTP. “It’s really been a cultural change because guys are used to touching a lot of the pieces and Puzzleflow just handles all of that for them,� Lane said.

Four of CNHI’s 21 papers have yet to be converted to the Puzzleflow platform, according to Corporate Vice President of Production Tom Shafer. “We want to get them all converted and we still have eight sites using film,� he told News & Tech. “Those sites are small and are in no real rush because we want to find the right CTP equipment or them.� p

Design lessons from page 27 disappearing digits behind the decimal point, the worse you’re doing in creating a meaningful experience for the people who were initially interested in your content.

Tracking improvement is important. But the really valuable part of this metric will come when you sit down and consider what actually constitutes solid engagement with your public and how you can engineer those opportunities for people.

As with most things, it’s about mindset.

Raju Narisetti, senior vice president and deputy head of strategy at News Corp., told the Digital

Media Strategies 2013 Conference that “most big newsrooms have focused on creating great content, and thinking the audience will come and hopefully they’ll pay. But having great content is no longer enough — everybody gets the same news. The experience the audience is getting from the content is what will differentiate us from competition and all experience only comes at the intersection of content and tech.� p

Brie Logsdon is a recent honors graduate of the Western Kentucky University (USA) School of Journal-

ism and Broadcasting. As a senior staff member of Western iMedia, she was the primary UX (user experience) journalist on “Inside Confucius� and continues to consult on the project. Contact her at brieonna. logsdon@gmail.com.

Kerry J. Northrup, creator of WAN-Ifra’s Newsplex, works with media organizations worldwide to design tech-savvy multiplatform newshandling operations. He holds the Turner Multimedia Professorship at Western Kentucky University, where he trains non-traditional “fusion journalists.� Contact him at kerry.northrup@ newsplexer.com.

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