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When I pulled up to the food pantry, I was greeted with this chaotic scene. There were dozens of residents out there. They had bags of food and bags of clothing and household items that they were ready to donate. And there, in the center, of it all was LoQuator Dinkins, handing out orders to her volunteers and chatting with her new donors. It was amazing to see — there were people from different races and different ethnicities. There were people with different religious backgrounds, who had all come because they’d read this story and they wanted to help save her food pantry. When I walked up to LoQuator, she was chatting with a man who had driven several hours from a wealthy posh suburb to make a donation large enough that would cover that $3,500 electric bill. She told that man he had been sent to her by God. He said: “I don’t believe in God. I believe in good people.” The scene that I saw that day was so compelling and so inspiring and moving to me, it reminded me of the power of journalism. I went back to the office and I wrote about it too. You see, it’s those types of moments that keep me from becoming cynical. It’s those moments that help remind me that as journalists, we have the power to empower....
For most of us, we can absorb this continual stream of antisocial programming and not be affected by it. We still know what's right and wrong. But in a world where it’s the “black swan” outliers that grab the news headlines, we have to think about the consequences that reach beyond the mainstream. When we abandon the moral purpose of stories and focus just on their entertainment aspect, are we also abandoning a commonly understood value landscape? If you’re looking for absolute answers, you won’t find them here. That’s just not the world we live in. And am I naïve when I say the stories we chose to tell may have an influence on isolated violent events like what happened in Orlando? Perhaps. Despite all our best intentions, Omar Mateen might still have gone horribly offside. But all things and all people are, to some extent, products of their environment. And because we in media and advertising are storytellers, we set that cultural environment. That’s our job. Because of this, I believe we have a moral obligation. We have to start paying more attention to the stories we tell....
This week we explore a publishing platform that integrates story components in a unique way, and a startup that organizes news reports around historical context.
PART 1: FOLDA Web-based publishing platform developed at the MIT Media Lab arranges related elements in a visual way that puts multimedia material into view alongside the text. Co-creator Alexis Hope tells us how the two-dimensional structure is enabling some experiments with storytelling....
PART 2: TIMELINETimeline is a technology-driven news operation that infuses historical context into the news of the day. We learn from Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Kalan how the team delivers stories in a time-based format optimized for mobile devices....
Social media is having a dramatic, perhaps outsized impact on how digital news is produced, distributed, consumed and ultimately monetized. As mobile and social technologies reach critical mass, it is fueling a footrace to create highly shareable, yet informative news stories that generate traffic. More critically this is changing how journalists approach their craft.
To address this dynamic further, Katie Scrivano and the Edelman Media Network (a team of earned media specialists) teamed with two start-ups,NewsWhip and Muck Rack to study U.S. social news consumption.
Working with NewsWhip, we identified the 50 overall most-shared, English-language articles, and in six key topics – general news, food and beverage, energy, health, technology and finance. Edelman Berland then analyzed each story to identify significant commonalities. This helped shaped a survey of more than 250 working journalists that Edelman conducted in collaboration with Muck Rack....
...These are exciting times. New transmedia projects are cropping up left and right and the debate over ”what the definition of transmedia is?” seems to have taken a bit of a step back. All in all it feels like we’re slowly – or perhaps rapidly; these are things that can better be assessed in hindsight – moving towards a media and content world where there is no need to talk about transmedia, as every project is as transmedia as it needs to be to fulfil any potential that project might have....
Since launching in private beta last year, Medium has been building up its platform, which aims to offer a simple but 'beautiful' reading and writing experienceIt was one year ago this week when the online publishing world was abuzz with the news that two of Twitter's founders had launched a new platform called Medium, in private beta.In the early days only a select group of people were allowed behind the scenes to contribute content to Medium.
Some details on the platform were made public via an announcement post from Ev Williams, in which he described Medium as "a new place on the Internet where people share ideas and stories that are longer than 140 characters and not just for friends".In the past year the group of people invited to write has grown, and we are told it "should be a short wait from now" when the platform will be available for all to use.
The main aim of Medium is to be "the best place to read and write about things that matter", and this emphasis on both the writing and reading experience has been reflected in its approach over the past 12 months....
The Pulitzer Prizes for journalism were announced this week, and the winning stories represent a variety of different angles, techniques and tools that provide good ideas – and more than a little inspiration – for public relations and marketing communicators.
In April 2011, Kelley Benham gave birth four months early. Her daughter Juniper’s birth was supposed to be a joyous occasion. Instead, it was marked by physical and emotional pain, shock, and uncertainty about whether the micro preemie, who weighed just 1 pound 4 ounces, would survive. Benham and her husband, journalist Tom French, were faced with a pivotal question: Fight for their daughter’s life or let her go? In a recent three-part series in Poynter’s Tampa Bay Times, Benham wrote about how she and French confronted this question and how the answer they sought has changed their lives. “A story is a promise,” French said to her as they read to Juniper. “It’s a promise that the end is worth waiting for.”...
The immersive multimedia documentary, built using Zeega, tells the story of the impact of oil drilling in North Dakota. Todd Melby wants to tell small stories. Hardly an impossible goal for a journalist, but when you’re looking at something as big as the explosion in oil drilling in North Dakota, the scale of the story can get out of hand. In less than five years, the state has tripled its oil production; the Census Bureau estimates western North Dakota (where the oil is) will see its population increase by 50 percent. Big story. So Melby decided to to tell the macro story in a micro way, focusing on the roughnecks who come to North Dakota in search of jobs, the daily experience of working on an drilling rig, and the families whose lives are upended by the oil patch. The result is Rough Ride, a multimedia experience that takes an intimate, documentary-esque approach to telling the story. Split into a series of chapters, Rough Ride divides up the various players and scenes found throughout North Dakota’s rapidly expanding oil country, intertwined with interactive graphics, photography, and first-person video. (It’s not something easy to embed in an article like this; you really do need to go to the site and let it play to get the experience. Go full screen if you can. It’s immersive in a way that a 600-pixel-wide frame can’t be.)...
To enter Syria, CBS News foreign correspondent Clarissa Ward has squeezed through holes in fences, waded across canals and slogged through muddy fields in the middle of the night, paying smugglers to help her sneak past government checkpoints. Once inside, she works under the radar, dependent on ragtag bands of rebel fighters for food, shelter and safety. For locals caught helping a foreign journalist, "It would mean certain death," says Ward, who speaks "passable" Arabic and has been inside Syria six times in the past year.... [Great reporting, courage and powerful storytelling ~ Jeff]
The Hurricane Superstorm Sandy storylines are still unfolding, but one thing became clear on Monday as winds and water overtook New York City and New Jersey in historic proportions: Digital media deepened the transformation of the disaster narrative. Here’s some of what’s out there today in various storytelling forms... [Very interesting to see the various forms of storytelling ~ Jeff]
David Holmes: "A computer that can write like a human is a neat trick. But Moxie Awards finalist Narrative Science is taking the role of the robot journalist to the next level"... Of all the new technology companies disrupting the field of journalism, none hits home quite like Narrative Science. As Co.Exist reported back in November, the Chicago-based company, which is up for a Moxie Award this week, has developed an algorithm that can mimic human writing so effectively that… well just have a look at these two Forbes.com leads and see if you can tell which was written by a robot...
Via The Digital Rocking Chair
A Sunday morning tweet from NYU’s Jay Rosenprovoked a conversation about why journalists call the opening of a story a “lede.” Jennifer Connic, a social media producer at NJ.com, tweeted, “I kind of like lede still. I can’t describe why, but I do. Maybe it’s my newspaper roots.” Steve Buttry responded, “I don’t think you should spell it ‘lede’ unless you can remember how molten lead smells. I can, and I don’t...”
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Using NewsWhip Analytics, we found the top 10 stories from five of our top 10 Facebook publishers in December 2016. NewsWhip Analytics can give data on hundreds of stories from different publishers over various time periods, allowing audience development and analytics teams to perform in-depth analysis on their most successful content.
We ranked the stories by total engagements they received on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest, and then calculated the average word count for the top ten stories. We didn’t include headlines, subheadings, pull quotes, or calls to action within the story (‘Read More’, ‘Scroll down for video’ etc) in the word count.
Here’s what the average length of the top ten most engaged stories from five top publishers were in December....
An American woman whose traumatized, dust-covered face summed up the horrors of the September 11 attacks has died of stomach cancer at the age of 42.
Marcy Borders, known as “The Dust Lady” thanks to the photograph taken in the immediate aftermath, became one of the most recognizable survivors. She had started work at Bank of America a month before the attack, and was working on the 81st floor of World Trade Centre when the first plane hit.
She managed to make it down to the ground level and was walking away when the second plane struck the tower, leaving her covered from head to foot in thick grey dust.
Storytelling is evolving. It no longer has to follow the same basic, linear structure. Digital stories are going nonlinear. They are being “atomized” — broken into component pieces and then reassembled in new and interesting ways.
Look at the work done by Storify, Genius, Circa, and Embed.ly, to name a few organizations that are experimenting with new ways of telling stories or conveying information.
And now here comes Fold, which opened to the public last week. Fold is a platform for telling stories. It makes it simple to add multimedia background information or create context. It’s easy and intuitive to use. Anyone can publish stories on it; it’s free....
“Innocents Lost” tells the story of 477 children killed during the past six years by their parents, by their parents’ significant others, by neglect, by drugs, by abuse. But it also tells the story of a system that each one of those families came into contact with before dying.
They tumbled into canals and drowned, baked in furnace-like cars, were soaked in corrosive chemicals, incinerated, beaten mercilessly, and bounced off walls and concrete pavement. One was jammed into a cooler posthumously; others were wrapped like a mummy to silence their cries, flattened by a truck, overdosed and starved. An infant boy was flung from a moving car on an interstate. A 2-year-old girl was killed by her mom’s pet python.
The children were not just casualties of bad parenting, but of a deliberate shift in Florida child welfare policy. DCF leaders made a decision, nearly 10 years ago, to reduce by as much as half the number of children taken into state care, adopting a philosophy known as family preservation. They also, simultaneously, slashed services, monitoring and protections for the increased number of children left with their violent, neglectful, mentally ill or drug-addicted parents....
"Hi is a website that lets you attach a snippet of text and a photograph to a location. We call that a moment. Moments are grouped by location. You can then choose to return to that moment later and extend it — write 100 or 10,000 words about it. That collection — moments tied to location, some short, some extended — is a narrative mapping."
Via Marie-Sophie
Create Epic Stories with Shorthand...
New storytelling tool for journalists, writers and creative people looks very promising. It's in beta and is definitely worth exploring.
Awards season continues with the announcement of the American Society of Magazine Editors’ finalists for the National Magazine Award. The organization this week honored 62 publications in 23 categories, with winners to be revealed in New York on May 2. The National Magazine Awards have long honored the best of narrative journalism, especially in the Feature Writing category. This year, ASME combined the features bracket with the Profile category. Here are short excerpts from each of the seven finalists in “Feature Writing Incorporating Profile Writing:”...
When a helicopter crashed in a densely populated part of London around 8am today, next to one of the busiest trainlines in Europe and a large bus station, the news was always going to be broken, within seconds, by members of the public on Twitter, armed with camera phones.
Twitter user Craig Jenner was one of the first to put a picture on Twitter which was shared far and wide.
What happened next is indicative of the way the media are increasingly playing catch-up on such stories, moving from reporting to aggregating (or curating, if you must) - images, eye-witness accounts and videos. Journalists were asking to use the picture with a credit and were trying to get Jenner on the phone...
On Nov. 29, 1972, a crude table-tennis arcade game in a garish orange cabinet was delivered to bars and pizza parlors around California, and a multi-billion-dollar industry was born. Here's how... [Great writing, wonderful storytelling and cultural insight. ~ Jeff]
Kevin Moloney: "Transmedia journalism is designing a project to unfold across multiple media in an expansive rather than repetitive way" ... [Excellent overview of Transmedia storytelling ~ Jeff]
Via The Digital Rocking Chair
Resources for journalists and storytellers who are learning to use multimedia tools and techniques. Soundslides is a simple tool that builds simple audio slideshows, with optional captions. That’s all it does. But that’s actually quite a lot — especially because Soundslides is truly “ridiculously simple” to use. Soundslides does not produce video files, and you cannot import video into Soundslides. (If you have paid for your copy of Soundslides, see this page.) Soundslides uses still photos, a single audio file (MP3 format) and text. To see a good example of what Soundslides can do, watch this story from National Public Radio: Crafting China’s Future Champions (2008).... [Mindy McAdams reviews this useful tool in detail ~ Jeff]
My love affair with narrative nonfiction was in its early stages when I first read Robert Kurson’s “Into the Light,” in the June 2005 edition of Esquire. I was mostly clueless about the art of plotting as a way to transport and transform the reader, but when Kurson’s story pulled my emotions in opposite directions, I began to understand the particular power of building tension by changing course. Reading “Into the Light” is like having a deep and tormenting debate with a friend over drinks about the meaning of life and the cost of change.... [Storytelling so good! JD]
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Journalist Lolly Bowean on Chicago community: "I’m here to remind you today that great journalism can also find ordinary, regular people and find the extraordinary in what they do."