July 1st Journalism Focus Group

We had done a lot of secondary research about journalism, and even some primary research with news readers, but we had so far been unable to talk to any journalists. That all changed with our focus group exercise on Tuesday, We brought together an editor, a blogger, and three readers of both print and digital media. We asked the journalists what their perception of their readers were, how stories were chosen, and the value they get out of their work. We asked the readers about the perceived value they received from reading the news, and whether they would like to have more of a voice in the types of stories that were written. Finally, we asked both the journalists and readers about interactions between writers and readers, and their thoughts on digital vs print media. After that discussion ended, we asked the group to look at a couple of our early design concepts and give us feedback.

Through this exercise, we not only got to practice running a focus group and the setup and assignment of team member responsibilities, we also gained valuable insight into how both readers and writers see the current publishing industry, and where they think it’s going. We got to learn about the reasons our group read certain publications over others, and that trust in the publication is a big theme. We also learned about the role that freelance journalists play in the news that is presented, and the perception around paying for news. Namely, that the interaction model around getting and reading the news might have to fundamentally change in order to persuade the people who currently read news for free to pay for it. Perhaps most importantly, we got feedback on our design concepts, which reinforced the idea that what people say they would like is not necessarily something they would use in reality.

This focus group had a large impact on our future design work, because it reinforced some of our assumptions about the news, and tore down others. Many insightful and relevant quotes came out of that focus group, which we can use both to inform our future designs and to provide proof for our design rationale. We also gained a lot of value from showing the group our early design concepts, because getting feedback this early in our ideation process allows us more time to revisit those concepts and iterate on them, or come up with completely new concepts.