This is bound to get long, so bear with me.
I am sitting at Halifax airport and digesting two days of information presented at the Magazines East conference organized by Atlantic Magazines Association. It was a short, but good conference. The speakers included people like D.B. Scott and Melanie McBride. There was a lot of information on magazine industry in general and the ways magazines could and should expand their reach and build communities on line. There was some talk about difficult economic times, but, overall, the tone was positive and optimistic. One thing that was not discussed and is almost never discussed by print media types was storytelling on the web.
I do not for a second want to suggest that discussing new business models for solid journalism is a futile exercise. It is most definitely not and it is extremely important that we pay close attention to several experiments currently going on and ranging from micro-payments to paid content to not-for-profit models to charity structures for serious journalism. A lot of people who are much, much smarter than me are currently thinking and talking about those kinds of things – people like Jay Rosen, Mark Hamilton, Matthew Ingram and the crew at Neiman Lab, folks at the Canadian Journalism Project, CJR, NYT, Ryan Sholin, Mark Deuze, Scott Rosenberg, Dan Kennedy, and many, many others. These are very important conversations.
The sense of urgency over developing sustainable business model(s) in the age of Web 2.0 and beyond probably has a lot to do with the fact that the craft of story telling has fallen somewhat by the wayside.
It is possible to argue that blogs have created a new writing form, but I think that they are not that different from the previously existing forms. They still demand that the reader follows the text in a sequential manner albeit with the ability to expand the content and the context by following embedded hyperlinks. The reader’s ability to immediately and impulsively respond to the text is seemingly new, but as somebody who once had a pleasure to man the night desk of a large daily, I can tell you that impulsive responses at 3:00 a.m. are not that much of a novelty.
Photojournalists, more so than writers, have proved themselves willing to experiment with different content presentations. They embraced video and audio and many (like John Lehman and Brent Foster) consider themselves visual journalists rather than just photographers. This new wave produced what we today commonly call multimedia. What we mean by it is an on-line presentation that combines photography, video, audio and sometimes text and is accessible through some sort of a flash-based player. The best such efforts (Globe and Mail’s short docs, Magnum in Motion essays, Mediastorm productions and Bombay Flying Club gorgeous packages) can be very good, informative and esthetically pleasing. However, I believe they all fail in two important ways and one is more serious than the other.
At this point, all of it is in the experimental stage and using video seems to be seducing many a photo editor, but, to be honest, I yet have to see a multimedia package where the video component is truly indispensable (a couple of Magnum in Motion productions come close). I suspect that this preoccupation with video is driven by technology as much as by management jumping on the video bandwagon because they are afraid that if their websites do not include video, they will somehow be left behind. This will all sort itself out eventually. What will not sort itself out so easily is the fact that even the best multimedia, in my opinion, misunderstands and misuses the on-line medium.
It’s really hard for me to say this because I like multimedia. I love the ability to see stunning photography coupled with good audio and tight editing. I have watched some of it over and over again. The problem is that vast majority of readers lasts about 60 seconds into a piece. Yep. That beautiful eight-minute multimedia package you produced sure impressed your colleagues, but the non-journalism world simply tuned out after 60 seconds. I believe what we are doing wrong is that we treat what is an interactive medium as a passive one. All you can do with a web video is press play and watch.
Now compare those 60 seconds to the time an average World of Warcraft gamer spends playing on-line every week – 22 hours. That works out to almost 4 hours a day, often in one sitting.
I am not suggesting that journalism has to be packaged like a role playing game, but I do believe that more interactive content compelling the readers to physically engage with a story would go a long way in extending the time they spend watching what journalists produce.
To find examples of some innovative on-line story telling we need to step outside of journalism world into that of fiction. I have recently discovered Penguin’s outstanding site We Tell Stories. This is not the best fiction you’ll ever read. But, it is the most interactive fiction you’ve ever read. The six stories all use different story telling techniques ranging from simple choose-your-own-adventure type of story in Fairy Tale to an interesting use of Google Maps in The 21 Steps. Go through them and think how we could use some of those approaches to digital narratives in our own reporting. For example, my new favourite place on the web is the New York Times remarkable and interactive feature One in 8 Million. On the continuum of interactivity it’s much closer to what I imagine we could eventually accomplish, but you could conceivably build this feature into an even more interactive piece along the line of The 21 Steps. That’s the kind of interactivity I would like to see in journalistic story telling. I would bet that you could take a chunk of those casual gamers who take a break from work and play a game of tetris or scrabble or trivia for 10 to 15 minutes and turn them into multimedia audience if you make their experience interesting and truly interactive.
So what would that kind of journalism look like? Well, think about how you as a journalist collect information. It’s very much like a World of Warcraft string of quests. You are assigned a story, while researching it, you uncover more material that requires more research and a follow up story and so on. Let your readers do the same. If you are the Globe and Mail or CBC or Toronto Star and have the resources to play and experiment, build that kind of an interactive content around complex issues that unfold over long periods of time. This can be the current financial crisis, climate change, conflict in Afghanistan or hockey playoffs. Use interactive maps, interactive timelines, short multimedia/audio/video/photography, animated infographics, well written text, interactive photographs (something along the lines of Jonas Bendiksen’s work on slums – but let readers click on objects and people in the photographs for additional information). Make each piece of information a piece of a puzzle that helps the readers understand the complexity of the whole story. Let them enter and exit where they want. Let them wonder through the story. Let them find their own way in what is for them still an uncharted territory. Let them explore it and draw their own map of the place you are taking them into.
What I find astounding is that newspapers haven’t done this already. Nobody is better equipped than newspapers and magazines to understand that readers need multiple entry points into a story. Open any newspaper or magazine and you’ll see that this has always been done on a printed page. There are headlines, decks, photos, sidebars, graphics, pullout quotes, subheads, captions, timelines… As a reader you can start at any of those places and proceed as you please. Why do we expect those same engaged and intelligent readers to be satisfied with staring at the screen is beyond me.
Melanie McBraid hit on one of the biggest barriers to this kind of content in her presentation at the Magazines East. Fear. Not just fear of technology, but fear of losing control of the story. That is foolishness. Editors, journalists and publishers never had the control over the story so there is nothing to lose. What a great time this is to unleash the creativity of people who have time and again created amazingly compelling content packaged in interactive and effective design and give them a free reign over a new medium that they instinctively will understand better than anybody if we only give them a chance.
***
This is Henry House in Halifax. A place I would much rather be discussing this in than here on this blog.
Croatian word of the day:novinarstvo journalism