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3 tips for innovation in the newsroom
“Product managers know this very well: The best way to build a tool, or any other newsroom product, is by learning about your users’ needs, building a prototype, and incorporating feedback to improve it over time. While some of the needs of open-source journalists were known to me from the start, others arose only after the toolkit had launched. For example, user feedback suggested we should have a stronger focus on comparing tools that solve similar research tasks, so we introduced a “similar tools” section. Users also asked for the ability to download all the content from the toolkit. At first, I did not understand why, but it turned out that many journalists wanted to create their own versions of the toolkit to which they could add other tools they discovered. In this way, we are continuously tweaking the toolkit to make it better, based on user feedback and what we learn.”
-- Johanna Wild, open source researcher, excerpt from “Lessons from building an online toolkit to aid open-source investigations” (Nieman Reports)
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