Design Research

LATINEXT

Highlighting Chicago’s Rising Latinx Voices

The Chicago Reporter and Univision Chicago have teamed up to create LATINEXT: a first-of-its-kind cross-platform news team to engage and address the information needs of the 2.1 million strong Latinx community in the Chicago region. This project is radically rethinking the relationship between the newsroom and the audience, “putting the service back in public service journalism.” For this Knight Lab Studio project, students will: conduct design research about the needs of this audience; help LATINEXT prepare to responsibly involve the community in the journalism process; and, propose a near-term roadmap for developing the project further.

Faculty and Staff Leads

Joe Germuska

Chief Nerd

Joe runs Knight Lab’s technology, professional staff and student fellows. Before joining us, Joe was on the Chicago Tribune News Apps team. He is the founder of CensusReporter.org, and a proud board member of City Bureau.

Project Details

2020 Spring

Important Questions
  • How might we best engage communities across a large, distributed geography?
  • How might we best assess the news and information needs of very different Latinx communities across our region?
  • Given the distributed demographic profile of Latinx people, how might we establish baselines for assessing responses, coverage, resources and language?
  • How might persistent, digital engagement experiences (chatbots and livechat) contribute to more relevant and meaningful news and information?
  • How should we resource, vet, produce and distribute community-centered journalism?
Sample Milestones
  • Weeks 1-2: Meet with TCR/Univision Chicago teams. Study materials provided by TCR.
  • Weeks 2-4: Conduct research on regional Latinx landscape, develop personas and audience profiles.
  • Weeks 5-6: Workshop existing engagement pipeline to prototype workflows for content and response/engagement. Share back with LATINEXT principals.
  • Weeks 7-10: Implement and iterate. This is a live project that is in a provisional launch state but we are still benchmarking capacity and expectations. We will put some of these ideas — maybe all — to the test so we can collect feedback from our users/community and develop insights that will inform and improve the experience/product.
Outcome

Students and partners will take a human-centered design approach to modeling public engagement; conduct audience and demographic research; and propose a roadmap for the next phase of the project.

Links