Join us this fall: a monthish-long book club on making the shift to service

Most newsrooms are built to publish: stories, newsletters, videos, explainers. Around that content sits the product: the app, signup, or paywall that gets it to people. But what keeps people coming back is the service: the promise you make and keep, how people find you, what happens when something breaks, and whether they'd miss you if you were gone.

Making the Shift to Service is a five-week, one-page-a-day workbook for journalists, media entrepreneurs, and information producers (solo or on a team) who want to build the habits that move you from content production toward designing an information service people depend on.

Five to ten minutes on weekdays (weekends are off): first you learn to see the exchange behind any service, then you turn that eye on your own work, then on one real person, then you try something small and learn from it.

We're running an end-of-year virtual book club, five weeks, meeting once a week from November through December 2026, where we'll work through the workbook together alongside fellow practitioners putting these ideas into practice in their own newsrooms. Register your interest below and you'll get your free digital copy of the workbook as part of joining.

This workbook exists because of the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, whose support carried this work from a single question at the 2025 News Philanthropy Summit to newsrooms across five continents. We're also grateful to Piper Lyman of StudioPiper, who gave this book its shape, its warmth, and its magpies.

The Service Desk is Gazzetta's applied service design practice for civic media, supported by The Lenfest Institute for Journalism.