By Amy Gahran
The cutting room floor of journalism is a sad place: all those facts, interviews, asides, anecdotes, context, insights, and media gathered during reporting which, while relevant and interesting, just don’t fit comfortably into the narrative flow or length/time limits of the finished story.
This doesn’t merely represent wasted time and reporting effort. Many of those scraps are missed opportunities to engage readers and gain search visibility or links…
Right now, most journalistic tools and processes (technological and otherwise) are focused on putting out one ultimate product: “the story,” which is a finished, edited, packaged piece of content with a narrative structure such as an article, video, audio piece, or photo gallery.
Stories are great—I write them, and I love them. But I mostly agree with Jeff Jarvis that articles have become a luxury or byproduct in today’s information ecosystem. Articles and other structured narratives take a lot of work to produce, and they involve a lot of waste. I think they’re worth doing, but they’re definitely not the only or best approach.
For a long time I’ve been considering how journalists and publishers can break out of the “story box” in order to gain more visibility and engagement from all parts of the reporting process—not just from the end product.
What would that look like? Right now, when a reporter is working on a big feature, she could publish a few compelling interview excerpts or photos as short posts while she’s assembling the narrative. Many reporters already do this with their blogs.
This can be one way to generate interest in the upcoming story. If that blog is part of the news site, then this technique also can prime your search visibility around the topic—which makes it more likely that your finished story will get even better search ranking when it finally drops.
Also, small discrete story modules work better for mobile users, who not only have smaller screens but also smaller chunks of available time and attention. A Legos-style story could be a more effective way to engage people’s attention on the device they have in hand.
http://www.knightdigitalmediacenter.org/leadership_blog/comments/20110602_the_lego_approach_to_storytelling
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