After feeling out my project, conducting light interviews about it, and talking to class members, my professor conducted a brief Q&A for members of the class to fill out. My professor's questions are listed as the Q's and my general thoughts are the A's.
Question: I have read your idea and I would like to understand a little more about it. What need does this idea fill? Is this a need that you have yourself? Who would share this need?
Answer: This idea fills the need for reaching a broader audience and getting the news out to more people. As we've experienced in the digital age, journalism accompanied with photos, videos, and hyperlinks has huge success in the online community as well as in print (though hyperlinks make no sense in that context...nor do videos, for that matter). But people like to be engaged. Comic strips have always been the way to engage the biggest audience of any newspaper or magazine, at least I always thought. Of course this fills my own need, as well, because I desire to see the news in a way that interests me. I love comic books and I never have the chance to read them. I also love the news, but I hate reading it. I remember I used to read Newsweek magazine. My favorite part of that magazine were the two political cartoons wedged in the middle pages. Did I understand what I was reading? No, not always, not even half the time when I was younger. But I got more information, more understanding of how little I understood, out of those political cartoons than I ever did in the rest of its pages.
Q: At this point you should have some idea of who the average user of your product will be. What is the profile of that person?
A: I imagine the majority of my readers would be high-school aged students all the way to the middle aged. But as you can see in my interview with my grandmother, even she would be engaged with my graphic stories.
Q: Who wants this product that you intend to develop?
A: The people who want this product are the people who are interested in experiencing the worldly news in a new way. They are the people who use multiple senses to get immersed in stories and really retain its messages. More generally, the people who want this product are the people who want to be entertained, engaged, and immersed while they're going through the daily news.
Q: What problem or need are you satisfying for your customers? (Remember, the customers aren't necessarily the people who will be using your product. For example, television audiences aren't customers unless they pay for the product, as in HBO. The customers are advertisers.)
A: I'm satisfying the need for something new and for something engaging for anyone who subscribes to me. For advertisers, I'm presenting a new form of news that has the potential to grab a lot of interest. I imagine that a lot of readers would be engaged with the page, at first anyways, and if people are looking at the page, it's an opportunity for ads to be seen by a lot of people.
Q: Who wants this product?
A: I think there's a general hunger for seeing the news differently (hence why Stephen Colbert and some other news-comedics are so popular). So I would say a lot of people who want a new experience, though I can't be sure right now.
Q: We all have to live. Where is the money in this product?
A: The money would come from both advertisers and subscribers. Hopefully.
Q: You are a journalist. Where is the journalism in this product?
A: The journalism is in the details of the graphics. A journalist has to pay attention to the surrounding details to make the graphics work, and then fact check with whoever is drawing the graphics. The journalism is also in the captions, descriptions, and dialogue within the graphic news, detailing carefully what information must be written and what information must be drawn.
Q: We've read that passion is key to success of a new venture. Money alone will not sustain it. So where is the passion in your product?
A: I'm just as hungry for this product as my interviewees seemed to be. Not only that, but I love comics. If I can make my news look like a comic book (except not quite), I'm going to go ape.
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