Interview with Tow-Knight fellow Keng: Part I
kuangkeng: Hi Keng, can you share with us how you end up as a fellow at Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism?
Keng: Sure. During my final semester in NYU’s Studio 20 graduate program, I partnered with Foreign Policy to develop a training program for its journalists to integrate data journalism into their daily reporting. At the end of the semester, Studio 20 organized this event where students took turn to present their project to NYC journalism community. It was there that Tow-Knight Center Education Director Jeremy Caplan saw my presentation and approached me to join the 4-month fellowship. I always wanted to understand the business side of media. I see it as a must-have skill if I want to transform myself from a journalist to a media innovator or entrepreneur. So I said yes to him.
kuangkeng: How different is the business side from the journalistic side?
Keng: First, I don’t think it is in the best interest of a publisher to draw a fine line between journalism and business. As Jay Rosen, my professor at Studio 20, said in his recent blog post, how can journalists make a good product, which can be either content or service or both, if they don’t understand how their colleagues are selling the product? This becomes more crucial when the traditional media business model that relies completely on advertisement is falling apart. Without advertisement to subsidize the journalism, publishers are struggling to figure out different models to monetize their journalistic products. It makes total sense for people who make the products to be a part of this struggle, right?
I guess the biggest difference between those two is the position of users in their product thinking. Journalists used to see the product as what they think is worth publishing, or in their language “agenda setting”, but entrepreneurs see it as what the users really want. In other words, they are more "user-centric”. The idea of putting users at the center, and delivering what they want through the channels they prefer, really struck me.
When I was a reporter with Malaysiakini, my colleagues and I liked to say "we are serving the people”. But looking back, did we ever interact with our users to understand what they want, who are they, and why they read our stories? Did we ever collect their data and analyze it although we have the ability to do so? Not really. We were obsessed with metrics like the numbers of share and like, but we don’t see them as real human being.
The concept of user-centric has started to grow on me when I was in Studio 20. The fellowship however illustrates the concept in a more concrete way - how other entrepreneurs put the concept to work, and practical techniques to approach users and carry out user testing.
kuangkeng: You sound like you have learned quite a lot from the fellowship although you are only in the fourth week. Maybe give us a summary of your takeaways?
Keng: Definitely. The best thing about such a fellowship is that it creates an environment for you to really geek out on the thing you want to build. You are surrounded with people who are equally passionate about their projects, great gurus who are sincere to transfer their knowledge, and real entrepreneurs who share their experience and ready to answer your doubts. Of course there’s information overload and you need to grasp many business terms and concepts in a very short time, but I enjoy it very much.
In the past 3 weeks, not only I was thinking hard about my own project, DataN, I was also wrapping my head around all the challenges faced by Malaysiakini. As I have spent 8 years with Malaysiakini, it serves as a good study case for me to think about how the recommendations and best practices shared by the speakers and gurus can be applied. While I’m training myself to be an entrepreneur, I guess I’m also preparing myself to be an intrapreneur.
DataN - Big Data, Small Newsroom (by NYU's Studio 20) from Kuang Keng Kuek Ser on Vimeo.
kuangkeng: Great, but I don’t think you have answered my question.
Keng: Oh, right. Sorry about that. Well, I find many of the systematic approaches to problem-solving very helpful such as the project management framework provided by Jeff Mignon and Nancy Wang of Revsquare, as well as the business model canvas and Lean Business Model Canvas given by Jeremy. They provided me a framework to think through many issues around my project. If you really sit down and fill up the canvas carefully, it forces you to think really hard about all the details that you previously overlooked or avoided.
Other related events that I attended in the past one month, although not directly related to my project, exposed me to many provoking ideas. Many of those can be experimented in Malaysiakini to innovate the ways stories are told.
I still remember the short presentation by futurist Amy Webb during the IWMF’s Cracking the Code conference. She explored different ways to deliver news to user’s smartphone based on location, time, routine and activities of the user. That’s totally doable and very very cool.
Another thing that struck me was her view on the word “scale”
Scale doesn’t imply impact or attention. It implies “bigness.” What real good is that? #Code15
That makes a lot of sense on my project because DataN is more like a consultancy service, and my focus is not on scaling to become another multi-million startup but how to create value and impact for my clients. The number of clients that I can serve might be small but done properly it could lead to significant impact in the regions where the clients are operating.
During my time in Studio 20, I have been exposed to many ideas and concepts raised by Jeff Jarvis, but still he helped to refresh them.
kuangkeng: Last question, can you update us the progress of DataN?
Keng: There was some progress made in the past one month, but everything is still in a very early stage. I’m talking to a media VC which is interested to use DataN with 2 of their clients which are news outlet in eastern Europe. I also scheduled a training with Malaysiakini in early March. In the coming month, I need to prepare the training modules and tools customization and integration for Malaysiakini.
I have more or less built a hypothesis for my business model, so the next step will be recruiting potential users, in this case small newsrooms in developing regions, and interview them to validate my hypothesis.
