Building an International Product Incubator for Public Media

New_ Public, Head of Public Spaces Incubator, 2022–2023

My Role: Strategy, partnership development, team building, research lead · Timeline: 12 months · Team: Built from 0 to 5 · Budget: $3.6M in partner contributions

The Challenge

Public service media organizations are losing control of their relationship with audiences. Commercial social platforms determine what people see and how broadcasters can reach them — with incentives misaligned to public service values. Meanwhile, audiences increasingly expect to participate in conversations, not just consume content. But building consumer-facing digital products is risky and expensive, and no single broadcaster has the resources or expertise to go it alone.

New_ Public saw an opportunity: bring multiple public broadcasters together to pool resources, share risk, and collaboratively develop digital conversational tools that these organizations could own and operate — recapturing the conversation from commercial platforms and elevating it to the same level of importance as content.

Nothing existed when I started. There was no formal agreement, no team, no process.

The Solution

I designed the Incubator from the ground up — writing the strategy, creating the phased approach (Discovery → Design → Development), and building the operational infrastructure to support an ambitious international partnership.

I negotiated the final grant agreement and built the budget across four public broadcasters in four countries and three languages: CBC/Radio-Canada (Canada), ZDF (Germany), RTBF (Belgium), and SRG (Switzerland). I served as the hiring manager for the first three team members — a researcher, facilitator, and program manager — and later brought on a designer, engineer, and new project head.

I launched and managed the Discovery phase, including stakeholder interviews, secondary research, and deep dives into the conversational media landscape across all four partner contexts. This phase culminated in a multi-day international workshop I led in Mainz, Germany, where the full partnership converged on a shared focus for the next phase: cultivating civic discourse.

I designed the Incubator from the ground up — writing the strategy, creating the phased approach (Discovery → Design → Development), and building the operational infrastructure to support an ambitious international partnership.

I negotiated the final grant agreement and built the budget across four public broadcasters in four countries and three languages: CBC/Radio-Canada (Canada), ZDF (Germany), RTBF (Belgium), and SRG (Switzerland). I served as the hiring manager for the first three team members — a researcher, facilitator, and program manager — and later brought on a designer, engineer, and new project head.

I launched and managed the Discovery phase, including stakeholder interviews, secondary research, and deep dives into the conversational media landscape across all four partner contexts. This phase culminated in a multi-day international workshop I led in Mainz, Germany, where the full partnership converged on a shared focus for the next phase: cultivating civic discourse.

After establishing the Incubator's direction and team, I transitioned leadership to a new project lead and continued to contribute to the program — leading design research sessions in Canada, Germany, and Belgium, and helping lead subsequent workshops including the convenings in Montreal and Brussels to select the focus areas for our second and third design sprints.

The Outcome

The Incubator I built went on to produce over 100 prototypes which were refined to a core portfolio of 16 product concepts that had been validated with users across all four countries. The team developed six end-user archetypes and identified core audience motivations for online conversation—I presented these findings at an invite-only symposium on comment section research and development. We ultimately selected a portfolio of nine flagship features — from AI-aided moderation tools to new interaction models for cross-content conversation — that partners are now implementing through a shared toolkit.

The toolkit itself is a flexible, opinionated tool for talking about issues of public concern.

• Cross-content: Each PSI discussion spans multiple content pieces

• Question-led: Every discussion is headlined by a question or prompt

• Prosocial format: Every discussion space can be structured by a prosocially guided format

• AI Pre-moderation: Every discussion space is proactively moderated

Meanwhile, the Public Spaces Incubator demonstrates that public media organizations can collaborate internationally on product innovation, share the cost and risk of building new digital experiences, and develop tools grounded in audience research rather than engagement-driven algorithms.