What’s the story with Storify?
I’m diggin’ it! Joined the beta (thanks, guys!), and I’m amazed at how powerful this tool is. It takes journalism and story curatorship off the page and out of the linear realm once and for all.
What follows is a digital mashup of my early foray into “storification”…
Talk about the future of journalism often takes on a victim-istic tenor. [But] there’s poetic sensibility in his [David Schlesinger’s] words:
Knowing the story is not enough. Telling the story is only the beginning. The conversation about the story is as important as the story itself.
[…] Along this line, he clearly sees Reuters embracing social media:
What is great about 2010 is that technology has created a completely new concept of community. And it has given that community new powers to inform and connect.
[…] Schlesinger goes on to say the Reuters model will combine the best of both worlds, “the professionalism of the journalist and the power of the community.” Underpinning the Reuters approach, storytelling remains a core tenant as Schlesinger shares:
If we have learned anything from these past two years, it has been that pure facts are not enough. Pure facts don’t tell enough of the story; pure facts won’t earn their way… We’ve been drowning in facts, and that deluge continues to threaten.
[…] What Schlesinger has written is more than an insider’s look at Reuters adjusting to a digital world that puts the consumer in charge.It’s a manifesto for news organizations around the world.(Ishmael’s Corner)
Lou Hoffman’s post about the merits of storytelling communities (ie. nexus of conversations provoked by a story) is a thoughtful and refreshing counterpoint to the woe-is-me grumbling we hear so much lately.
He is reacting to David Schlesinger’s post, “Changing Journalism; Changing Reuters”, and I’ve excerpted some of the most compelling thoughts from both of them above. (Note: I’ve condenced their paragraphs to simplify the layout.)
This notion that the future of journalism — and to a large degree, storytelling, in general — lies in sharing, interaction and community is thrilling. And it’s totally accurate. One-way information is dying. Journalism and storytelling will become more democratic in the process, allowing a much broader conversation to replace the top-down approach that has long prevailed. Citizen participation. Citizen journalism. Open source journalism! It’s exciting. And it poses all sorts of new challenges. Fact checking, for example. And curatorship. As more and more content is generated and aggregated from increasingly diverse sources, it will become more and more inportant to sort, organize and filter the flow if information. This challenge of curatorship will be one of the critical areas of innovation over the next decade.
And last but not least, Schlesinger’s comment about the limitations of facts, reminded me of that old story about two beautiful young maidens, Truth and Story… Let’s see if I can find it!
“There’s a revolution going on right now in the way that people consume journalism. We’re at a point where technology is going to enable us to view and consume media in an entirely different way… One thing that we’ve been great at doing is telling stories… This is just adding one more avenue of communicating and connecting with the brand of Wired… We really would like to offer more choices to our readers and to our advertisers and move beyond just the static notion of ink on a piece of paper.” ~ Scott Dadich (Creative Director, WIRED)
For years I’ve been talking about stories and storytelling. For years people have rolled their eyes and reminded me that storytelling is for kids. Okay, that’s not quite true. I’ve managed to win over a few along the way who’re willing to admit that stories and storytelling are among the most vital building blocks of community, of education, of entertainment, of marketing, of sales… Especially in the last few years. Finally folks seem interested in storytelling. Storytelling is cool! This makes cocktail parties a little more exciting for me, and it encourages me to explore further, question more, dream bigger.
This morning I woke up thinking about the intersection of storytelling and technology. My mind was racing. My rumination included various dissimilar but related ingredients including:
On the one hand, last night I performed in Mrs. Farnthsworth at the Old Mill Studio in Elizabethtown. Community theater. Amateur. Fun. Short run. We started out at BlueSeed in Saranac Lake and we head up to SUNY Plattsburgh later this week. The show dishes up plenty of political snarkiness and the audience is the final judge of what is true and what is fabrication. This Thursday and Friday you can judge Mrs. Farnsworth for yourself.
I haven’t acted in a few years, and my first inclination was to decline when I was approached last winter. But then I read the play. And I reconsidered. Not because of the politics. Not even because of the uncanny coincidence that my character was also a creative writing teacher. Two stronger reasons compelled me, a longstanding fascination with acting as a form of storytelling and the notion that remembering how a play is produced (as seen from the inside out) might serve to make me a better president of the Depot Theatre board. I’ll weigh in again on this once we conclude our run.
Last night was our fourth performance of six. Not out best. That was Friday. We really aced it on Friday. Actors were at the top of their game, and the packed audience didn’t miss a beat. Such fun. Virtual reality in the oldest sense! It’s a quirky play, especially fun for me to play Gordon since I’m both a teacher and a writer. Reminded me of moments in the classroom when a lesson was really humming along, students were totally in the zone and ideas were popping. An amazing experience. Addictive. Just ask a teacher. It also reminded me that my first moment in a classroom was storytelling… But that tale for another day.
On the other hand, I spent yesterday experimenting with Intersect’s story sharing platform, and urging Storify to let me “alpha preview” their storytelling platform. Both services offer so much promise! I really enjoy the stripped down simplicity of Intersect, but I’m fascinated with the curatorial potential of Storify. Both platforms are still mere glimmers of what they might become, not exactly prenatal, but early, early in their development. That said, these two technologies offer two of the essentail ingredients for the future of journalism: intersection and curating. I don’t just mean sharing content easily and across multiple platforms. I don’t just mean offering a clumsy threaded link list to interested story followers. I mean that convergence of these two platforms could literally reinvent journalism, collaborative, real time reporting and storytelling.
Stories, by their very nature are rhizomic. Instead of simply converting traditional print journalism and storytelling to digital (most of what the large media outlets have undertaken so far), the future isn’t flat. Nor is it linear. Nor is it ever in final format. The future is fluid. Information is viral, mutable, shareable. Collaboration is critical. Content affinity is critical. Similar and/or complementary content must connect. And as the massive proliferation of content overwhelms us, curating and aggregating and reviewing/commenting and fact checking become essential. Information strata and intertextuality and multimodal media must interlink, be sortable, trackable. Trying to flatten this future model of journalism, of storytelling into one dimensional print interface will not only be more and more challenging, it will also be less and less necessary, less and less desirable.
Although it’s a somewhat restricted example of the sort of story aggregation and curatorship that could be possible with next generation tools, Tim Carmody’s (@tcarmody on Twitter) “Lobbying for Followers on Twitter: A Love Story” offers an amusing and powerful example of where we’re headed. Add video, audio, slide shows, comments, forums, etc. to the equation, and it’s staggering what you wind up with. How will we navigate, sort, verify, absorb, enjoy this new content interface? Verdict’s still out, but I can’t wait to begin experimenting.
Which takes me back to the video and to Tristan Harris, the CEO of Apture, who waxes enthusiastic but befuddled about the need for a convergence in technology and storytelling:
“You need people from a computational background and from a storytelling background to be able to satisfy the interest of say a publisher who is trying to tell stories and the people who consume information while also satisfying the… and leveraging, I guess, the technology of the medium itself that let’s us do innovative things that we couldn’t do before.”
Yes, we need those people. And we need them to imagine and build and support the next generation of storytelling tools. In the mean time, I’m going to keep exploring their efforts while telling my own stories. And I’m going to continue enjoying the fact that folks finally know (and care) what I’m talking about at cocktail parties!
“Fears grow over oil spill disaster” (Video via youtube.com)
Is this the understatement of the year: “These guys [BP] don’t have a great record in taking care of people’s health and safety.” This comment, made by Greenpeace’s Mark Floegel about BP’s insistence that shrimpers, fishermen, etc. who wish to assist in the clean up effort must first sign a BP indemnification waiver. (Note, this quotation comes at about 2:20 in the video.)
Google is leveraging its multimodal muscle via the Crisis Response pageto help cover the oil spill, aggregating timely content and publishing updated Google Earth layers to help visualize the scope, evolution and impact of the spill.
“Google is taking a major (though low-profile) step into the realm of crowd sourcing news. Users can upload their videos of the spill or news related to the Gulf oil spill, and the videos are published to a YouTube playlist, making a video record of the disaster and what is being done on the ground to stop it.” (Mother Nature Network)
Perhaps this is the silver lining? Citizens around the world are quickly learning to contribute to the story, create history as it’s made, participate in the global dialogue that until recently was interpreted and disseminated by a few. Citizen journalism is open journalism! This shift is exciting and inspiring. The democratization of information, of news, of history. Can open government be far behind?!?!
Michael Arrington’s recent TechCrunch post about old media “guys” who don’t get it made me realize how far things have come — and how much better they’ve gotten — in the world of journalism.
The Way Things Were (Wrong)
Why, for example, could we could lift from other sources without offering attribution? I remember when a librarian at ABC News taught us how to use news databases to find stories from local media that could serve as grist for our mill. On another occasion, I pretty much re-reported a Japanese magazine’s story for Newsweek. The Japanese magazine’s editor called me out privately, but I never paid any further price…
The Equation Is Changed
I remember… the first real-time chat between people in China and a major news website… the experience was raw, unfiltered and direct from the source — without any correspondent to tell us what was being said. The unlimited space, flexibility of time, and ability to bring others into the conversation broke down the barriers that the journalist can place, even inadvertently, between those involved in the news and those interested in it…
Change for the Good
Access to information has, obviously, improved as well. Search engines such as Google and myriad other information sources, from Twitter and Facebook to Digg and Delicious, have made it easier to be sure we don’t miss what’s relevant. They can also enable us to find serendipitous links that take us on new journeys. Sure, there’s still proprietary information locked up in Factiva, Nexis and Bloomberg terminals, but you’d be hard-pressed to convince me we have less access to good information today than we did before the web.
Accountable advertising
Today, in digital media, advertisers can at least tell if their ads have been served to (and presumably seen by) a viewer…
Read the full post at pbs.org
Hat tip to Dorian Benkoil at MediaShift for this insightful post about the merits of new media (despite his preference to stop calling it that.) These highlights gloss some of his insightful examples, so you’ll want to read the full post over at PBS.org. I’m especially drawn by his emphasis on attribution/transparency and the idea that it’s become so much easier for real people to share their unfiltered experience in real time. Less clear to me is his assertion that, “Journalists are also now held to a higher standard, and have to be more transparent.” I hope this is true, but I’m not always as confident as he is. Do you agree that today’s journalists are obliged to be more transparent and distort information less than in the past?
Aaahhh yes… This was too good to pass up. I’m going to pass along a Talk to the Newsroom snippet from New York Times Executive Editor, Bill Keller’s response to a reader’s complaint about badly written news leads. Read. And then re-read. And then print it, pin it up next to your desk and read it again every day. Am I speaking to myself? Perhaps.
Q. The colorful lead is the bane (or at least one of the banes) of my time spent with The Times. So often, I have tried quickly to get the gist of a story (this happens in the Sports section more often than in the news sections) only to find that I must read something like ‘it was a dark and dreary night’ before finding the point, or the score, or even a notion of what the article is about.
Whatever happened to the inviolate rule that a lead was 35 words or fewer, telling us where, why, what or who? (Peter C. Boulay, Bronx, N.Y.)
A. As the sun blazed above the snow-lacquered peaks of the Hindu Kush, the weary editor flipped down his clip-on sunglasses and booted up his laptop.
It had been a long week, a soul-sapping, disorienting and yet strangely satisfying week.
Past the simple campsite where he awaited his digital connection to the modern world flowed all the human mystery of the East: the women shrouded in burqas of azure, or possibly cerulean, he was not too good on blues; the camel-borne warlords draped with belts of bullets; the shoeless boys in filthy ‘I Heart New York’ T-shirts; and all the rest, all separated by semicolons and swaddled in colorful clichés.
The computer flickered to life. The keys clicked. (Bill Keller, New York Times Executive Editor, Bill Keller)
That image above is one of the “picture poems” I included in 40×41: Midlife Crisis Postponed and it combines contour drawings that I made in 1994 during my final year in college with abstractions from photographs that I took in Peru in 2011. I’ve previously posted elements of “Contours & Artifacts” in Choice (June 4, 2012) and Wonder (December […]
