How the Philly papers are experimenting with design thinking in the newsroom

If the digital revolution holds one enduring lesson for the news industry, it’s that, in the long run, the internet tends to reward those publishers who are most attuned to their audiences.

While analytics can offer insight into how current users react to existing content, it doesn’t help publishers uncover topics and approaches they haven’t tried and audiences they might be missing.

At the Philadelphia Media Network — publisher of The Inquirer, Daily News and Philly.com — we chose to take an experimental design-thinking approach to this problem.

I shared some practical tips and lessons learned in a recent Medium post for the Lenfest Institute.