More is not always better: Lessons from our Philadelphia media service design sprint
By Madison Karas and Patrick Boehler
In March, we gathered eight media organizations in Philadelphia to develop service-oriented journalism ventures in a one-day service design sprint as part of The Lenfest Institute for Journalism’s Live LENs event series.
Our goal in convening was to co-develop services that fill an audience's information need and sustain revenue streams, while going beyond the default journalism strategy of content production as monetization. The challenge: by the end of the day, walk out with a service experiment and a plan to test it in 90 days.
Our group included people from legacy media outlets, independent creators and journalists, designers, entrepreneurs, and editors from across Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware.
We had an exciting, ambitious group: At the outset, everyone shared an interest in meeting real-world information needs over preserving traditional news models.
They wanted to move audiences from spectators to participants in journalism: producing not just articles, but real information utilities that "move beyond surface-level reporting to empower residents with local authority" and "de-center the journalists and newsrooms in favor of journalism skills, tools, and community members."
Participants arrived with a service venture opportunity they wanted to develop, and from there, the work began on sharpening their ideas into a specific service hypothesis to test and build on:
Service hypothesis: We believe that [specific person or group] has the problem that [specific pain point or unmet need]. We will address this by [specific service intervention]. We will know this is working when [observable user behavior]. We will measure success by [specific metric and target].
Throughout the day, we discussed in groups how developing a service hypothesis and experiment plan requires approaching media venture ideas from new angles: defining services vs. content, mapping out value exchanges, and designing metrics from intended outcomes.
For many participants, nailing down a precise service hypothesis required a level of clarity that surfaced places for further research and learning.
Here's what we learned from the day's conversations:
Service design asks journalism to take sides – for people, not positions
In one discussion, a participant raised that defining and pursuing an outcome for their organization's journalism can feel like blurring the line between an information service and an advocacy organization.
This is a real tension in the field, and one worth sitting with.
The distinction the group kept returning to: the goal of an information service isn't to advocate for a specific end goal, but to equip people with what they need to exercise their own agency – so they can better choose and create their own end goals.
That's not advocacy for a specific change. It's advocacy for a person.
Clarity is harder than production
One of the consistent pressures in the journalism industry is the pull toward output: more articles, more products, more programs. When we produce more, it can fuel our assumptions that more output = more needs served.
Yet among those production streams, it can be harder to articulate the exact need, or needs, being served. The service hypothesis format makes this tension visible.
Stepping back to actually write down and articulate a specific opportunity can pinpoint areas for growth that might otherwise be overlooked, and how to validate that you’re truly serving the needs identified. It's easier to serve one area really well than to take broad brush strokes without clarity on where you're actually serving.
Even inherited assumptions need to be tested
Journalists often have hunches for story or project directions rooted in deeply held ethics around accountability, transparency, and truth.
Service development doesn't replace that instinct – it adds a layer of questions editorial judgment doesn't always ask: Where does this information connect back to someone's life? How will someone use it? What opportunities exist to make it relevant?
We discovered that mapping the full arc – from spotting an opportunity, to where it connects to problems in people's lives, to what it enables people to do – is a different discipline, and a complementary one.
Outcomes over outputs
In discussing how to measure the success of our service experiments, we talked about shifting traditional media measurements from counting outputs to tracking outcomes. This shift is straightforward to describe and genuinely difficult to operationalize.
When you measure journalism's impact by what you enable people to do, rather than what you produce, it challenges traditional notions of success. More articles published no longer equals a more effective newsroom.
It also surfaces uncomfortable questions that go beyond metrics: What does our newsroom seek to accomplish for people? Is it more journalism, or more people able to do something because of our journalism?
By the end of the day, participants had changed, scrapped, or narrowed the scope of the service venture they wanted to pursue.
The process asked something genuinely difficult of everyone in journalism: "Although I've done a lot of service-oriented projects before, I've more often than not started out already knowing what the need was… I was starting with a project already in mind and trying to work my way back to a need, rather than centering the need to begin with," one participant shared.
Identifying which assumptions needed testing, and where to focus our resources, is what our service design sprint helped surface, for all of us.
This piece was produced as part of Live LENs, a Lenfest Institute for Journalism program. The Service Desk is Gazzetta's applied service design practice for civic media, led by Madison Karas and Patrick Boehler, which uses service design principles to move news and information businesses from good intentions to actionable strategy for the people they serve.
With Lenfest's support, the Service Desk has worked with dozens of newsrooms and independent creators across four continents to identify concrete service and revenue opportunities, map the obstacles that prevent follow-through, and develop specific, testable services audiences can actually use. You can reach us at servicedesk@gazzetta.xyz.
