Katie Zhu

Roundtable | Final Project Proposal

PDFs: Full Proposal | Written Pitch | Design Document | Business Brief
Media: Wireframes | Video Pitch | Time-lapse Prototype

Roundtable is a web platform connecting people, news and ideas.

Readers, journalists and experts are all invited to the table to share their opinions, exchange ideas and resolve issues. Together at the Roundtable, news becomes debate, conversation, an experience. 

→ Download the written pitch as a PDF.

Use case and target audience:

Every morning, Nicole wakes up to an inbox full of news alerts.

• Federal Reserve to keep interest rates unchanged.
• Stocks suffer sharpest drop since 2008. 
• Apple surpasses Exxon to become the world’s most valuable company.

She’ll glance over the headlines. Maybe skim a few articles in the five minutes she has before class. She’ll sigh when she reads about the London riots, nod in approval as she glosses over an opinion piece advocating a “digital upgrade” for education.

But then, Nicole closes the tab.

After all, she’s a busy college student — juggling classes, work and friends. She reads the news. Loves interactive graphics. Tweets links to WIRED articles. Skims comment threads, but never posts.

And that’s it.

There should be more interaction available to the 21st century news consumer.

Video pitch:

Time-lapse prototype:

The state of comments:

Comments are broken. The system does not foster coherent discussion. Trolls are everywhere. 

We must re-imagine how news is consumed on the Web. There’s no medium that fosters elevated discussion between reporters and their audience — commenting implies the reader’s point of view is only supplementary to the reporter’s story.

But news should be bi-directional.

Despite the rise of digital media and growth of interactive journalism, the average reader’s news consumption experience has remained relatively static. In an informal survey about reader engagement with news, sixty-five percent of respondents said they simply “close the tab” after reading an article. Twenty-nine percent will share the article through social media. Only three percent said they would comment on the article. And zero respondents said they would email the article’s author for further discussion.

Clearly, there’s something wrong with this picture.

Changing culture:

Information and technology are converging. News has traditionally been an information product, but how can it adapt and scale effectively to its technology dimension?

The New York Times’ Room for Debate and the Economist Debates are two examples of successful interfaces that leverage Web 2.0 to encourage an exchange of ideas between content producers and consumers.

It comes down to a shift in the underlying cultures of reader engagement and reporter participation.

The concept:

Roundtable is a platform to spark this shift. It’s a tool designed for newsrooms to crowd-source news analysis through online discussion. Roundtable facilitates reader interaction with journalists and experts on relevant issues. Readers can use reporters’ expertise to get answers to their questions and context for relevant issues. Reporters can engage in positive intellectual discourse and get new story ideas, sources and tips.

The Roundtable project provides a framework for discussion that can be implemented by any news organization on their existing website.

Anatomy of a Roundtable:

The outcome of any Roundtable is a resolution to the issue being discussed. Attending the table will be a host (or team of hosts), journalists, experts and readers.

Anyone can host a Roundtable. The newsroom using the platform may organize one, but readers can also apply to host a table with sponsorship from the participating news organization. This process will depend on the organization, though a substantial amount of preparation and background work on the proposed issue will be required.

Roundtable adapts its namesake’s format of discussion to an online setting. Each Roundtable will have five phases:

• 1/ Discover: Pre-table materials. Presents the Roundtable’s issue, background materials, context and any relevant links.

• 2/ Impress: The first phase of the Roundtable. Casual forum-like atmosphere, introductions, general thoughts and opinions. Participants get an unlimited number of posts. Interface: posts are displayed in a single linear thread.

• 3/ Discuss: Response-driven conversation to the issue at hand. One post per participant (which ideally will be their preliminary resolution to the table’s issue) with an unlimited number of replies. Interface: posts are displayed with nested replies.

• 4/ Resolve (Try the timelapse posting feature!): The submission phase of the table. One post per participant — their final resolution to the issue. Interface: posts are displayed in a single linear thread.

• 5/ Vote: Everyone attending the Roundtable gets to vote — there are no restrictions. Participants pick the best resolution which will serve as the table’s consensus on the issue. And because Roundtables are always open, participants can take back their vote and switch to another resolution at any time. This preserves the integrity of the voting system. If a given issue has changed, and public opinion has changed, the resolution should also change.

Site-wide integration:

Roundtable will effectively serve as another “category” or “section” page on news websites. Each table’s “discover” phase will link to relevant articles on the publication’s site, promoting the news organization’s content. 

Similarly, after a table has concluded, articles pertaining to the Roundtable’s issue will link to the end resolution in the page’s footer.

Technology:

Roundtable will live and breathe in the Web, using HTML5, CSS3 and jQuery to construct a lightweight, customizable interface — making it easy to integrate into news organizations’ existing websites.

Challenges:

What’s in it for journalists?

Reporters have limited time and resources. Why should they join the table? The opportunity to feature their articles as part of the Roundtable interface could be a motivator. Journalists who are passionate about engaging with readers can be rewarded with a link to their article in the “discover” phase of a table addressing a similar issue.

Who will participate?

Everyone is busy. In today’s digital age of news consumption, appointment television is dead. Everything is on demand. Roundtable compensates for these trends in its implementation — a table is real-time, but with asynchronous qualities. The discussion window is framed wider than an hour, allowing people to come and go, participating at their convenience.

Roundtable users will also have a profile, displaying a brief bio, topics of interest and relevant statistics about their participation in tables:

Newsroom and audience culture:

The traditional “article plus comment thread” model is almost an industry standard — why buck the trend? Shifting the newsroom’s focus from producing content to connecting people requires a cultural shift, but the only way to start the dialogue is to build tools that promote this momentum. On the reader side, not everyone wants to participate. There will always be those who simply close the tab. Roundtable’s mission is to steadily lessen this number, one reader at a time.

Cost of maintenance:

The sunk cost of building the project’s interface and technology is not the biggest point of concern — it’s curating the community that comes afterwards. Roundtable is a platform, inherently diverse and applicable to a wide range of topics. Maintenance costs, such as hiring discussion moderators or manually cleaning up content, have been considered in Roundtable’s user interface design. The structured discussion format and posting limits will work to create a self-selecting participant pool, minimizing the potential for spammers and trollers by maximizing the amount of effort required to post.

Design Document: View wireframes AND check out the “resolve” prototype.

Roundtable counteracts the effects of the “filter bubble,” pushing readers away from consuming media that simply affirms one’s pre-existing notions. It allows interested parties from both sides of the news production/consumption continuum to come together in a roundtable discussion, sharing ideas and exchanging points of view.

The Roundtable project is open-source, open-process. It will be built in the most transparent way possible, incorporating all stakeholders in the newsroom ecosystem — managers, reporters, developers, designers — in a process of agile development. There will be multiple project iterations to learn what works and what doesn’t in the context of a newsroom.

Business Brief:

Roundtable allows newsrooms to build on their existing resources — reporters, readership and content — to generate resolution-focused discussions on a variety of issues and build a collaborative community around their news product.

At its very core, journalism informs the citizenry. Newsrooms serve this goal. The process of “informing” has grown increasingly two-directional, with the rise of social media and the Web. Readers can and should be engaged in the news whole process — not just see the end product.

Industry leaders have built platforms similar in idea to Roundtable — New York Times’ Room for Debate and Economist Debates —  exemplifying their forward thinking about changes in news consumption habits. Roundtable is an opportunity to set newsrooms apart, to exercise the power of crowd-sourcing in news analysis to build a community.

Once you have engaged and interested readers, what do you do with them? Readers should be heard. Newsrooms can use Roundtable to build a platform for them to come together and geek out over specific issues. To make reporters more accessible. To build community. To create conversation.

Download the full proposal as a PDF.