Call for Applications: Philadelphia Workshop

Apply by February 27th, 2026

Get notified by March 4th, 2026

Beyond content: Building services people use & that sustain your news venture

Come together for an intimate, one-day working session for Philadelphia local news organizations and independent creators with a shared goal: to be useful to their communities in tangible, practical ways.

In the midst of rapid change in journalism, we're not interested in debating missions or theories of change, but focusing on designing a real experiment: a specific way to help people that can be tried quickly, measured, and improved. And meet organizational business needs at the same time.

In the morning, we'll introduce tools that can guide organizations to develop one concrete service opportunity in your current work.

In the afternoon, you will have a dedicated 60-minute one-on-one working session with us, plus time to workshop your service opportunities and get feedback from peers.

Together, we'll create a plan that can be stress-tested to actually meet your audience needs, by clarifying who it is for, what useful means in practice, what constraints need to be designed around, and what it takes to achieve it.

What your newsroom will get out of this

• Strategic guidance for leading a service-oriented, self-sustaining business
• Feedback and design support from peers operating in the news and media ecosystem on how to challenge your problem or opportunity
• Confidential advising on a problem or opportunity related to your organization's audience or revenue strategy
• A personalized plan of action you can implement within 90 days of leaving the workshop to test and assess your audience problem or opportunity

Requirements for participation

• Your organization is able to send a team member to participate in the day’s activities
• You are coming with a clear intent to build something that is directly useful to a specific community, not primarily to refine brand positioning or abstract impact narratives.
• You are willing to share a real, current challenge or opportunity from your work, including constraints and uncertainties, and discuss it candidly in a small peer setting.
• You are prepared to choose one information service opportunity to focus on and commit to drafting a simple, testable experiment during the day.
• You will complete light pre-work if requested (brief context about your organization, the audience served, and what useful currently looks like), so the one-on-one time can really push strategy forward.
• You are open to learning from organizations with very different models and levels of maturity, and to offering constructive peer feedback.

About the Service Desk

The Service Desk is Gazzetta's applied service design practice for civic media, led by Madison Karas and Patrick Boehler.

Thanks to the support of The Lenfest Institute for Journalism, we have worked with dozens of media ventures from national legacy newsrooms to independent creators to identify and sharpen their concrete service and revenue opportunities, map the obstacles that prevent follow-through, and translate good intentions into specific, testable services people can actually use.

We focus on quick wins: small, practical changes that unlock momentum and reduce risk. The aim is to build internal capability and decision-making clarity so teams can keep iterating independently with greater intentionality.

Questions? Read more about our approach on the Service Desk or email Madison and Patrick at servicedesk@gazzetta.xyz. We aim to respond promptly.