Feb. 20, 2023

By Reilly Kneedler
Digital Audience Editor, Wick Communications
reilly.kneedler@wickcommunications.com

This is the first of a series of posts on our project’s process and learnings. Join our mailing list below to be notified as we publish. 

The student research team that led the Voices Listening Project was truly multidisciplinary — our 10 students came from eight distinct majors across journalism, public relations, sustainability and user experience.

Together they studied how Arizonans find news online, how they determine which information to trust, and how they discuss local news with their communities. 

The project, a collaboration between Wick Communications, a third-generation, family-owned local news company based in Arizona, and the News Co/Lab at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, wrapped up in December. It was primarily funded by the Google News Initiative.

This effort was born in the summer of 2021. Wick had just completed our first GNI project, which led to the creation of a journalist-moderated community conversations platform called NABUR. When the opportunity to apply for another GNI project arose, we sought out an academic partner to assist with the research and management. 

The Cronkite School’s News Co/Lab, which has become an industry leader in media literacy and news consumption studies, was a perfect fit. 

From the outset, students led the way by designing our research process, and conducting online and in-person interviews. 

Over the year, the team collected 1,638 online survey responses, spoke with 218 people through events and interviews, including 40 in Spanish, and made over a dozen in-person outreach trips to three target communities: urban Tucson, rural Safford and Maryvale: a diverse, traditionally underserved pocket of metro Phoenix.

With those learnings in hand, we shifted focus to solutions-oriented product design. Two student product designers were hired to build high-fidelity prototypes.

The research and product designs that came out of this project are already shaping Wick Communications’ audience strategy. This month we launched another market survey that builds upon the learnings from VLP.

Equally important, our journalism and public relations students were able to participate in the full product development life cycle, from survey design to usability testing. 

As the footprint of product management continues to grow in our industry, this kind of collaborative project is key to building innovation in local news organizations like ours.