Rebuilding Trust in the News Ecosystem

New Insights

The previous site focused on the DNI’s Innovation Fund — a way for creators and innovators to develop tools and technology that aids in the creation and distribution of journalism. Google had a real aim of making itself a genuine partner to the news industry and its various outlets and needed to present its commitment to the industry through the new site.

Fueling the next generation of newsmakers — a self service platform with inspiration, intelligence and investment to spur new ventures in news and tech.

Strategic Direction

Together we devised a new content strategy that from the outset was about creating a partnership. Acknowledgement, respect and honesty became key pillars. Google DNI are about bringing technology and innovation to the ecosystem not crafting the publishers content and that separation would be key in creating the new content.

We identified topics and formats that supported the goal while creating a platform for collaboration around projects and products that are featured on the site. Funded projects now get their own featured landing pages with the ability to link related news content to them. This editorial approach gave the collaborators a second platform for broadcasting their innovations.

The Experience Insight:

There is a lack of consensus on where things are going; news publishers are at different stages in their digital transformation journey. Large publishers, in particular, do not feel ready for change. Google must be able to successfully communicate to the techno-optimists and pessimists — regardless of the type of innovation Google can play a part in, it ultimately comes down to driving better storytelling. ‘Stimulating the ecosystem’ is seen as a credible role for Google, but their current perception from the industry is that they could play a greater role.

Crafting the Product

With the project goals and early definition of the product decided, we began to workshop with the DNI to fully understand everything they required to make our vision come to life.

We established a minimum viable product for launch. We built out our expectations for development post-launch to ensure that the product did not stagnate to continue to push the industry.

We prioritized the features against two criteria: Value and Level of Effort, both from the point of view of Code and Theory and the resources they had available internally.

Designing for Scale

A key requirement of the project was a user-friendly CMS that could scale in terms of content and users as the site grew, which was particularly challenging considering the strict security requirements of Google.

The end result is a bespoke CMS running entirely on the Google Cloud platform. It is highly modular in its approach meaning it will be trivial to scale with future requirements of the site.

The short project timelines meant we approached the design and build of the new DNI site with a very lean and swift way to create the minimum viable product (MVP) and embrace an extremely iterative strategy throughout the process. We’re continuing to help them gathering new requests and feature ideas for the next phase of work.