Poynter featured the Sarasota Herald-Tribune’s project, Unravel, which is a millennial news site for young professionals in the Sarasota area. I was one of the founding editors behind the project.

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The idea for a site devoted to Sarasota’s millennials didn’t come from that generation. It came from a design-thinking challenge led by Bill Church, the newly appointed senior vice president for news at parent company GateHouse Media.

The challenge? Figure out a way to reach an audience they weren’t serving.

A small team at the Herald-Tribune started with focus groups and get-togethers. That team, led by Justine Griffin, decided not to treat a generation as if it were all the same. Young professionals, they figured, were already invested and active in the community. Now, they needed to be informed.

But they didn’t want to be fooled.

“They said the biggest thing they didn’t want was to be duped into going back to Herald-Tribune,” said Griffin, 28, who’s now a business reporter at the Poynter-owned Tampa Bay Times.

Read more here.