virtualDavis

Mesopotamia (image by harvest breeding via Flickr)

Storytelling is often thought to have originated in Mesopotamia, where shamans would tell stories orally as a means of teaching and entertaining communities. Before we had written language, storytelling was told through a combination of drawings, which were often prompters for the storyteller to then bring the story to life through voice, dance or music. When writing was adopted in societies, various forms of media were then used to record these stories, for example etching on bark, or drawing on pottery or bones. (Simply Zesty)

A bit slapdash, perhaps, but a tidy nibble at the bigger story… Check out the post, “Social media has evolved into the art of storytelling, and we must all become masters of it.” if this nibble’s made you hungry for more. Though I should warn, the post’s thin on history and long on latter day storytelling jingoism.

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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!

Where to Look for Opportunities

When we start with the premise that consumers haven’t paid for content in the past, we gain visibility into new ideas that make sense for the digital era.

It’s not micro-payments alone that will save the future for professional quality media content. On the other hand, the idea that the consumer will always pay for distribution that massively over-serves their needs is not a foregone conclusion either. Paying $2500+ per year for cable/broadband/telephony/mobile in order to gain access to a million times more content than you could ever possibly need is not going to work out so well for the media industry either.

We need solutions that improve the relevance of content for individual consumers without expecting individual consumers to be able to predict exactly what they want. The Internet has exploded the supply of content but digital technologies have only just begun to filter and sample that content for the consumer in an effective manner.

Content providers who used to enjoy control over the method of distribution are feeling a lot of pain but their content remains vital and appealing to consumers. Rather than stomping our foot like Mr. Isaacson, it is better to focus on new solutions that tie content and distribution together in ways that create great consumer experiences.

We don’t know what the other side of this transformation will look like but we have guidance;

• Look at what the iPod did for music. Think about the critical role of sampling in the success of the micropayment model for songs.
• Look at the potential of what Kindle can do for print publications.
• Study the legacy of syndication that makes business partners of the content distributor and the content provider.
• Look at the popularity of expensive sets of DVDs for old TV episodes.
• Anticipate what the near-future DVR will be capable of doing.
• Think of what GPS will mean for the distribution of local and timely content.
• Think about what Twitter and search are doing to reveal the consumer’s need for specific content at precise moments in time.

It is time to think about distribution and content holistically. Digital technologies are not the enemy, they are an enormous opportunity to improve the relevance of content to the individual consumer. Don’t think so small as micropayments for one article at a time and don’t take for granted the current ability to charge a big fee for massively over-delivering irrelevant content. Look in the middle.

Somewhere in between asking the consumer to buy content “al a carte” and asking the consumer to pay for the whole menu, new “prix fixe” solutions are going to mature.

A Final Word from Our Sponsor

While we are at it, let’s not lose sight of the value of the advertising supported model. We are in the middle of a complex media transformation and a brutal recession. At times like this, pundits like Bob Garfield want to convince us that advertising is dead.

Advertising works. In the digital era, the consumer finds it very easy to ignore irrelevant advertising but they are quicker to engage with relevant advertising than ever before because the Internet makes engagement easy.

Be careful not to throw the baby out with the bath water in pursuit of the goal of getting the consumer to pay for the content. The advertiser remains happy to assume that role so long as we can offer a reasonably scaled and engaged audience. We just need to apply our new resources to help the advertiser better align their message with the right consumer at the right time.

Media companies can create new and better advertising values and it will still command a premium relative to the costs of distribution. Now that digital efficiencies have greatly reduced the cost of distribution, media companies need to look hard at the overhead that is a hangover from the analog era.

Some legacy media executives complain that they are trading analog dollars for digital pennies as advertising moves online. That is a valid concern so we can’t drag our feet when it comes to rethinking overhead costs from analog dollars to digital pennies as well.

We can reduce overhead, improve advertising value and find new consumer revenue models built on interesting combinations of content and distribution all at the same time. We need to be more disciplined about who the consumer is and what they really want as we build our new solutions, but the solutions are just waiting for the imaginations of new media moguls to find them.

via huffingtonpost.com

I excerpted this from an informative piece with sound thinking that I’d recommend to anyone creating content (word, video, music, etc.) for an audience. A few highlights:

#1. “We need solutions that improve the relevance of content for individual consumers without expecting individual consumers to be able to predict exactly what they want.”

#2. “Study the legacy of syndication that makes business partners of the content distributor and the content provider.”

#3. “Think about what Twitter and search are doing to reveal the consumer’s need for specific content at precise moments in time.”

4. “We need to be more disciplined about who the consumer is and what they really want as we build our new solutions, but the solutions are just waiting for the imaginations of new media moguls to find them.”