A talk given at Ryerson Journalism Research Centre's Transformations colloquium (http://transformations.journalism.ryerson.ca/) in Toronto on April 28th. It focuses on Journalism as a Product, and how newsrooms and product managers can work better together.

1. Journalism as a Product
Alex Watson
@sifter

3. What is the Product*?
*And why does he keep capitalising “Product”?

5. Because Lemonade
🍋

7. – James Harding, Head of BBC News
“Dissecting journalism can be like analysing a joke.
It takes the fun out of it and misses the point: whatever
change is to come, our job remains to find out what’s
really going on and report it.”

9. – Marshall McLuhan
“The medium is the message”

12. $100k test
You’re running a big news site, and commercial need +20% more page
views. Budget is $100k. What do you do?
• Hire a big name columnist
• Investigative journalism series
• Snowfallssss!
• Get the UX team to do infinite scroll like Quartz etc

13. Every choice matters

14. Real world
slow information / instant interfaces
Digital world
instant information / slow interfaces

16. What game are we playing…
& how do we keep score?

19. – Jeff Jarvis, journalism professor, blogger and writer
“We should measure our success not on old mass media
metrics of thousands of eyeballs that watched our
message, but instead on the answer to the question, did
our journalism help you meet your goals, improve your
life and improve your community?”

20. Some advice.

21. Interfaces &
Networks.

22. Interfaces
• Where can you still have that direct
connection with a reader?
• Why would someone choose direct, as
opposed to reading on a platform?
• (eg Subscription / high quality data /
features / interface / archive / community
etc)
• This will not be your scale audience, so
your business model needs to be about
high value transactions… ironically, the
front page is now for the core audience
(exact opposite of what it was in print)

23. Networks
• Put your journalism onto platforms,
and get a scale audience
• Hard to make it work commercially
in isolation… so embrace it for
what it is: a way to get people to
try you out
• Accept that you need to be fast,
popular, fluid, adaptive to get
people into your brand

24. “Art challenges technology,
technology inspires art.”
Ed Catmull, Pixar co-founder

25. “Technology challenges journalism,
journalism inspires technology.”

26. Thanks.
@sifter

27. Further Reading
• Jay Rosen on “product” as a term at news orgs: https://storify.com/
jayrosen_nyu/newsies-techies-and-that-troublesome-term-product
• Paul Ford on Product Managers: https://medium.com/message/its-
kind-of-cheesy-being-green-2c72cc9e5eda#.qu58mi1bc
• BBC Future of News report: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-30999914
• Facebook and the News ecosystem: http://www.cjr.org/analysis/
facebook_and_media.php