Rethinking Journalism: How we Helped a School Paper go “Digital First”
Overview
The UVU Review is a school newspaper that needed a visual facelift and more readers. The redesign was green-lighted when I came on as the web manager and suggested changes to the layout of the site and the overall look and feel of The Reviews’ brand. Later in the story design specs changed because the Editor in Chief decided to do a “digital first” push. In this case study, I will cover the failed redesign and the compromises I made and the work that followed in increased readership. Find the current site at www.uvureview.com.
The Problem
Is a similar problem most newspapers have. People don’t read the paper as religiously as they used too. The read blogs, digital magazines, or go to their Snapchat feeds. In order to compete for that attention, we couldn’t have a site that was just a plain Jane blog feed. The question was how we could make the news a relevant part of a college student living at our school? This isn’t just a website redesign. It’s a challenging of assumptions of how news is distributed. How do you increase distribution the local paper without the old methods of huge print advertising revenue?
Tuning in to what people are saying about the problem
A lot of students don’t take the paper seriously and most of the writers didn’t know about it until they applied to the paper. While other students, a small portion, to say the least, are engaged with the articles on the website and only a few follow the social media channels. I show clips from the Facebook page because, after the redesign, the main focus will be to grow an audience on that channel. Over 90% of The Reviews traffic already comes through there and if we could build that audience, we would be able to launch larger news products like a sports show, podcasts etc.
Ideating
I hit the moleskin and considered different ideas for solving the problem of the paper through a redesign. At the time, I wasn’t very sure how it would pan out, I know we had to build audiences on social channels, but what we drove traffic to, the website, it needed to look good and the information needed to look well presented. I didn’t have a “eureka” moment on how to save newspapers per se, I just assumed that a good first step would be a new website that matched user behaviors in the digital age. This includes getting relevant content in the front targeted audience based off of interests.
Iteration One: Failing Miserably
The main assumption to creating a better news website is by going the opposite direction that most newspapers go when designing a site. We wanted the design to be more of an internet publication so we purposely avoided anything that played homage to print. I also came up with new logo ideas to make the paper look more modern. What I failed to take into account, was how I would implement the design. I was an inexperienced designer, and I had no real intention of how a content-rich site would look. Ad’s are the lifeblood of the business, and I didn’t consider how to implement them in the design. Once I made these screens, I realized I was out of my league.
You can see my process in the download links below, but I’m not proud of them. There isn’t much intention behind it. It follows the clean business site layout I like but it doesn’t factor in the newspapers business model.
Download The The Project Brief
Download The Artboards
Next Steps
So after reviewing the design with stakeholders, and my ability to deliver, I did some tweaks and followed a WordPress theme that allowed me to have heavy customization options. Which can be found at www.there.vu. Next steps will be to optimize it and start recording metrics. Since the original redesign, I have learned a lot about how to execute on a design in the scope of business goals. The Review will be one of the few school newspapers that actually make money.
Big takeaway: I needed to consider the technology I could use before going all out in Sketch and I also learned that when it comes to a content-driven business. Things like content strategy, editorial calendars, how content is presented, and distribution all factored into how we would utilize the new website.
Project Management
After the redesign, I was promoted to put together the digital media team. I learned during a content marketing certification that it didn’t matter how good you were, if you want to get exposure, you have to pay. So I asked for an ad budget. After pitching, we where green-lighted to have a $2000 for digital distribution every academic year. We boosted posts and created “Like our page” Facebook ads to increase followers on our Facebook page, and from there, we could launch different news products.
Since I wrote this, I have grown a small team of videographers from a team of two (including me) to a team of ten videographers, two UX Designers, and an assistant project manager to help me run the team. The next goal is to create rich media experiences using our combined digital media might. Below was the starting like count on the Facebook page when I started working on digital distribution, and you can click on the link below to see how the facebook page is doing! Also we are now utilizing retargeting ads to create a relevant experience for users. Once I have more content to show they will be documented in another article.
Originally published at CadenD Studios.