Product Strategy for Scouted News

Scouted Media is a nonprofit organization which aims to help educate and inform the public by providing easy access to high-quality independent news. Scouted's vision is to create innovative capacity-building initiatives to help independent journalists promote and monetize their work.\n\nThe goal was to create an Apple News-style aggregation platform, where users could see relevant independent news from hundreds of sources all in one place.

Probable broke the problem down into a series of milestones and proposed an iterative delivery approach with clear go/no-go decision points at every stage. The key questions during the process were:

1. How can Scouted accurately classify each article when the content is coming from hundreds of different sources?
2. How can Scouted determine which articles are relevant to which users?
3. How can Scouted provide an effortless user experience to fulfil its mission of providing easy access to high-quality independent news?

At each stage, Probable proposed a solution to the problem, delivered a functioning prototype, validated the approach and delivered a high-quality solution:

• A custom-trained AI model for multi-label classification, allowing news articles to be consistently categorized with a discrete set of tags.
• Geolocation and article significance annotation services based on off-the-shelf LLM tools to quickly determine relevance.
• Apps for Android, iOS and the web which automatically configure themselves based on the user's location.