How newsrooms can learn from failure without failing in public

Frank Bi — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 09:32:26 +0000

This article was originally published by Frank Bi on Hacks/Hackers, republished with permission.

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> Journalism has to be right the first time. Product work learns more from what doesn't work. Frank Bi, AI Strategy and Product Advisor at Hacks/Hackers, argues that when products are held to the journalistic bar, nothing half-baked ever launches, so nothing ever teaches you anything

> Build a public sandbox. A labelled subdomain (beta, labs) resets the expectations readers bring to the homepage while still producing real behaviour data. Bi launched the Minnesota Star Tribune's AI restaurant guide Culinary Compass on the main domain instead, where readers judged a four-week experiment as a Star Tribune guide

> Set the end date before launch, ideally by picking something with a natural start & end. Bi's Fair Bot ran only the 12 days of the Minnesota State Fair, so nobody ever had to make the call to shut it down

> Show your work. Newsrooms already have a practice for issuing corrections, so extend a version of it to experimental products and publish what the team believed and why, before that thinking disappears at launch

There’s a tension between journalism and product innovation, and it comes down to a clash of mental models. Journalism requires getting the facts right the first time. On the other hand, product innovation learns more from what doesn’t work than from what does, and sometimes that means putting something half-baked in the wild to find out what audiences will actually respond to.

Luke Williams, a former creative director at frog design who taught my innovation and design class at NYU Stern this spring, has a line for this: be wrong at the start to be right at the end. It resonated because I’ve been in news organizations where the journalistic mental model is applied, often for good reasons. But when the product is held to the journalistic bar, nothing half-baked gets launched to teach us anything.

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