Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

The last year has turned the United States into a country of information addicts who compulsively check the television, the smartphone and the good old-fashioned newspaper with a burning question: What fresh twist could our national election drama and its executive producer, Donald J. Trump, possibly have in store for us now?

No doubt about it: Campaign 2016 has been a smash hit.

And to the news media have gone the spoils. With Mr. Trump providing must-see TV theatrics, cable news has drawn record audiences. Newspapers have reached online readership highs that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.

On Wednesday comes the reckoning.

The election news bubble that’s about to pop has blocked from plain view the expanding financial sinkhole at the center of the paper-and-ink branch of the news industry, which has recently seen a print advertising plunge that was “much more precipitous, to be honest with you, than anybody expected a year or so ago,” as The Wall Street Journal editor in chief Gerard Baker told me on Friday....

As an early adopter of convergence, award-winning journalist Sam Meddis made the leap to the web as USA Today's online technology editor in the '90s....

IJNet: What are the differences in storytelling techniques between print and visual media?

SM: In a text story you still want to describe things visually, but I think what you’re doing with a video story is concentrating more on what people will see and not describing it. You don’t have to describe what people are going to see — I think that’s a big mistake. It’s a different way of describing the visual element, but it is important if you’re writing a script that you’re not repeating what people are seeing.Print reporters are really good storytellers, and the storytelling is the thing that’s important. The technology — like how to use a videocamera and microphone — those things can be taught pretty quickly and easily. It’s really: Are you a good storyteller....