Expanding Austin360: Connecting with a New Generation
By Sathvik Allala, Michael Alvarado, Grace Rampaul, and Jean Ulacio
As a part of the Digital Innovations Capstone course, our group has chosen to evaluate Austin360 through the design thinking framework we have studied thus far. In the brief we were given by Austin360 stakeholders, we hope to understand how to revitalize Austin Statesman's marketing efforts by focusing on Austin360, while also enriching the audience experience. As we delved into the project, it became apparent that half of our team had not previously been acquainted with Austin360, which speaks to Austin360’s lack of engagement with a younger, media consumer audience.
This realization prompted our interest in understanding Austin360’s current role in the local media landscape, and where the brand falls short. At an extremely high level, we quickly identified a few areas that needed attention to better engage younger audiences. In understanding the media organization, we set up time with Rachel Kilroy, a Product Manager at Gannett, to understand areas of improvement needed for Austin360. She shared that Austin360's audience engagement has experienced a significant decline in recent years. We anticipate that this is likely due to a shift in consumer taste with regards to news consumption—those that consume news likely prefer mobile media sites, as opposed to web counterparts. As a part of the design thinking process, we aim to clearly identify and understand why Austin360 may or may not be engaging younger consumers. By the end of this project, we aim to provide Gannett with a plan to draw interest and engagement from 50,000 young, Austin-based users. This transformation seeks to address the challenges of engaging the younger demographic, making Austin360 a dynamic and resourceful media platform for all.
We came up with the question: How might we expand the Austin American-Statesman's marketing to include Austin360, while also expanding that interface? At this point of our design-thinking process, we are gearing up to collect insights on younger media consumers of Austin360. As per our conversation with Rachel Kilroy, Gannett would like us to understand how to better position Austin 360 as a lifestyle media source for Austin media consumers from 18-25-years-old. We have developed a first iteration of our research survey in which we will probe Gen Z media consumers on their psychographic consumption patterns regarding the content available on Austin360, as well as other local news media publications. Our next step will be to conduct focus groups and user interviews with a set of young Austin360 readers, that we have identified through our class stakeholder identification assignment. We look forward to collecting insights on engagement food, music, arts, and all things to do in Austin from these sets of consumer research processes. The insights gathered from our research will inform our first product iteration, which will achieve our goals of better engaging readers with Austin360 content.
