Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Anyone who’s taken a shortcut and skipped the primer while painting a room knows the kind of results you can get. Uneven. Unpolished. The primer sets the stage for a beautiful wall.

That’s kind of the idea behind the storytelling website Primer Stories, says Tim Lillis, one of the creative minds behind the site, which mixes medium-form written pieces with lots of eye-catching visual effects.

He thinks the stories should be just long enough to prime readers on the subject – about 1,000 words — while also acting as a primer of intellectual paint.

Story topics can be ambitious, but Lillis and co-creator Joe Alterio were intent on crafting narratives that are digestible for both longform lovers and listicle lushes.

“We realized that somewhere along the line, the important ideas were losing the battle of marketability,” Alterio says. “So, how do we give them a little bit of that flash while still retaining that core, essential part of the idea?”

Innovative storytelling, audience engagement, and financial flexibility are key ingredients for newspapers to cope with pressures from competitors, budget constraints, and the speed at which technology is changing."It came as no surprise when The New York Times took home a Pulitzer for 'Snow Fall' - the immersive multimedia package impressed journalists and web designers alike with its seamless integration of text, audio, videos, photos and interactive graphics."The comments in "Trends in Newsrooms 2013," the World Editors Forum's report on the state of the news industry, about the attention-grabbing content, underlined the importance of stories that jump out at readers....