Beyond galleries to quality slideshow content
Chadwick Matlin contributes to the growing set of forms and approaches when it comes to online slide shows. The random stream of images and dead end captions of basic photo galleries have given way to more structured slide shows that tell stories, convey complex information, and add great value and user traffic to new web sites.
Writing in the latest Columbia Journalism Review, Matlin sketches seven types of slide shows, including the “Listicle” and the “Essay.” Plus he’s enough of a realist to toss in the “Sex Show,” a form every web site manager and paranoid newspaper editor is well aware of, usually involving cheerleaders, fashion shows, nightclub parties, Miss Hooters contests, or some other variation on soft porn and high traffic. (What’s your version or war story on same?)
Readers like slide shows because they control the medium via clicks, the content can be powerful, and the topics are endless. Web site managers like them as each slide can represent one ad view. Done poorly (or cynically) and they will destroy your credibility. Done well they take digital news presention in new and interesting directions with minimal technical requirements and as showcases for traditional journalism skills — great images and tight writing.
Print perspective in the digital age
Rem Rieder, writing in American Journalism Review, arrives late to the realization that traditional morning-after hard news stories seem stale in the wake of real-time online coverage hours earlier. He observes, correctly, that:
With instant access to information available for so many people, an old-school hard news story looks pretty silly the following morning. In a world where so much information is widely available in real time, it’s imperative for news organizations to provide added value: analysis, perspective, context, narrative. And to make it interesting. Otherwise, what’s the point?
That’s been the case for years now.
The alternative for newspapers is “continuous coverage,” meaning a stream of coverage from the first short online post on through a growing package of online news during the day to the next day’s print story or package that provides the analysis and perspective. For newspapers trying to remain the number one news source in their communities, this has been the game plan for some time.
To build this kind of approach into the culture of your newsroom, it is important to settle on a set of online approaches that everyone is familiar with and can turn to as news unfolds. This can include the basic tools and clear standards and practices as to how to use them. There is also an editorial function, an aggressive but still measured approach to rolling out the news through the day online. Then, most importantly, it also means breaking off someone, or allowing the primary reporter the time, to report and write a print story that takes the basic news and explores impact and context.
Done well, continuous coverage provides readers with the emerging facts as news happens online and then provides the perspective and wrap-up the next morning in the paper and online.
Art of the profile
Prokhorov
This New York Times Magazine piece on Mikhail Prokhorov is a great example of centering a major profile on the defining characteristic(s) of the subject, and not just dragging the reader through a resume history. The young Russian billionaire is the new owner of the New Jersey Nets. The opening scene sets up the notion of Prokhorov’s ability to adjust and adapt, framed in the context of a specific martial arts skill. That becomes the thread as his story unfolds and his colorful personality arrives in New York and the world of professional sports. There is still lots of personal history in the piece, but animated with this key to his character. Some very nice writing as well.
Storytelling 6: Outline the story, frame a choronology
Comes the time to sit down and begin your story. First develop an outline that, in most cases, lays out the chronology of events. Once the timeline you’ve reported is complete, the question is what part of that timeline will be your story.
Consider the simple diagram below as your completed outline timeline. Each vertical hash mark represents an important moment or development in the story.
But that does not mean your piece needs to cover the entire timeline. So the next step is to settle on the point or meaning of the story you want to tell, and then identify which part of the timeline contains the material that will tell that story most effectively.
In the second diagram below, the yellow portion represents that portion of the total timeline that will be used to tell the story. Events that come before the yellow section become “exposition,” or material that may need to be woven into the story to help explain how events developed. Events that fall after the yellow portion are likely irrelevant, or may be briefly mentioned in touches of foreshadowing.
They key is to be clear in your mind about the story you want to tell — in terms of events and meaning — and then be disciplined about focus. Selecting a portion of the total timeline to focus on also allows for greater detail and variations in pace. And in addition to weaving exposition (earlier events) into the story, the occasional use of flashbacks can bring important moments into play in the flow of the partial chronology you’ve selected.
Next you will divide the highlighted chronology into sections. Using classic story structure, consider the three-act model wherein the first block introduces the main character and the conflict or complication, the second block shares how the main character works to resolve the problem, and the third block conveys the resolution.
With that basic story structure in place, go through your notes to determine what material goes where, including dialogue, description, exposition, etc. Jon Franklin, in his book, Writing for Story, recommends using file cards, with one card per scene or key moment. Note on the card what happens, the telling details, and the meaning of this specific event. How does it advance the story? What does it reveal? Lay the cards out in a line, like a storyboard, and try to see and feel the story as that sequence of events conveys. Franklin calls this “chronology with meaning.”
Determine if the meaning is the one you wanted to convey to readers. Are there scenes or moments that blur the meaning, take readers off on an unnecessary digression? Or is there a missing piece, either within the time frame you’ve selected, or an element of exposition needed to shore up a gap? This is how you preview the story you want readers to see and feel.
Storytelling 1: Touching shared emotions
Storytelling 2: Chronology is your best friend
Storytelling3: Pick a main character
Storytelling 4: Microcosm, telling details, and meaning
Storytelling 5: Subtext and universal experiences
Hazy vision of a new media ecosystem
J-Lab has completed a study of the Philadelphia news media scene and proposes a new scene comprised of many different sources of news all working under one collaborative umbrella. The collaborative effort is dubbed “news work,” and is intended to represent an “investment strategy” in the future of public affairs coverage.
News work is more than reporting and publishing stories. It involves curation, aggregation, data-gathering and visualizations, interactive opportunities for the public — and a mission that doesn’t just cover community, but helps to build it as well.
The report’s analysis of the present finds a fragmented and floundering news scene that disappoints many people. Daily newspapers and TV news are given pretty low marks. The many and varied online news start-ups score points for ambition but not much for clout or, in some cases, substance.
The goal of “news work,” according to the study, should be more and better public affairs reporting through collaboration and aggregation through one mega web site.
We recommend that this collaborative be anchored by an independent news website that would both curate and aggregate some of the excellent reporting originating in many of the city’s new media sites as well as provide original reporting on a half-dozen key topics and serve as the connective tissue for the partners. This should be a supplemental, rather than comprehensive, news enterprise. It should not try to cover everything the city’s daily newspapers do.
Like many visions of a happier digital media future, the report skips over who and how “excellent reporting” will be produced, and the skills, training, and resource that “media makers” would need. The central web site, too, rests on the news-wants-to-be-free assumption where content just sort of appears for the taking.
Without taking those mundane but essential operational elements into account, any investment strategy is incomplete. “When operational issues are ignored,” Marlene Caroselli of the Center for Professional Development once wrote, “vision remains in the realm of potential.”
Ken Doctor on the study: http://newsonomics.com/philly-report-thinking-about-the-roll-ups-to-come/
New formulas for local news
Two of the more highly anticipated local news site start-ups of the year are getting closer to actually launching.
In Honolulu, Pierre Omidyar‘s Peer News has hired John Temple as editor and a start-up staff. At the same time, Allbritton Communications’ new site in Washington D.C., as yet unnamed, under the direction of former washingtonpost.com managing editor Jim Brady, has also been hiring and sharing some of its plans. Both sites are working toward second quarter launches.
At Peer News, according to blog posts by Temple, the idea is to provide ample background, some news coverage, and host a vigorous reader exchange. Reporters are “reporter-hosts,” readers are “members,” and the focus will be on a core set of topics deemed important to the community. Structurally, as Temple described it, the site will feature
…specific “topic pages,” the building block of our news service. The first pages they started building are what we’re calling structural topic pages, things you’d need to know before you can frame any related issues. So, for example, how government is structured and how it works. Where the money comes from and where it goes. Or who owns the land in Hawaii and who regulates it. That might sound a bit like the stuff of civics class, and it is, but we want to do the work for our members so they don’t have to go digging through piles of data to find what they’re looking for. What we’re doing isn’t just data collection, although there’s some of that. It’s connecting the dots for people so they can focus on an issue at hand but quickly grasp context if they need it.
Brady says his site will be a mix of the high-end regional news stories and neighborhood-level news, data, and connections, foregoing the broad middle band of traditional news coverage. The site will for now also sidestep original education and business coverage and attempt to aggregate that content. Geocoding will be a primary feature for searching and sorting information. Speaking to PoynterOnline, Brady said:
“If you look at the past, there are some sites that just tried to do the community angle, there are sites that just tried to do the data angle, there are sites that just tried to do the original reporting. The truth is, I think that for a local site to be effective, it’s got to be a mix of all those things.”
Early glimpses of the two sites’ content plans are telling, both for what they want to offer and what they will not. Peer News wants to be the place people in their community come together, interact, and perhaps seed greater civic engagement. Brady’s sees his site as providing real time information that people can go out and use in their daily lives.
At first blush, neither site seems to place much value on storytelling. (Brady said: “…a lot of what is in the metro section still falls in the category of ‘human interest story’ — things that are really strong pieces or good reads, but less and less of it is what really matters like how you live your lives on a daily basis in the city.”)
It may fall to the members of Peer News and the many community bloggers Brady expects to engage on his site to tell revealing stories. Both sites might then find how great storytelling is at the heart of civic engagement, as stories remain the basic unit of communication between people about the things that matter most.
Writing in the latest New Yorker magazine, Peter Hessler describes his return to the United States after years living in China, and the striking difference in how stories work in the two cultures. In China, he observed, people were very curious about facts related to America. In the U.S., people did not care to learn that much about China.
At times, the lack of curiosity depressed me. I remembered all those questions in China, where even uneducated people wanted to hear something about the outside world, and I wondered why Americans weren’t the same. But it was also true that many Chinese had impressed me as virtually uninterested in themselves or their communities. That was one of the main contrasts with Americans, who constantly created stories about themselves and the places where they lived.
Hopefully new models for the public commons will also have space for stories.
Grann on great storytelling
Grann
In a recent interview for Nieman Storyboard, New Yorker writer David Grann makes excellent points about the early stages of a story, structure, and the revision stage, all in pursuit of a compelling storyline.
On the finding the focus:
For me, the most important part of the process is finding the story idea. If I can find the right idea, I can get out of the way and do a good story. There are many journalists I admire who can make magic or gold out of almost any material, but I have less confidence.
In all these stories, I’m looking for multiple elements. On one level, there is a story that is compelling, there are characters that are interesting, but also there are some intellectual stakes—and perhaps the story in there that has the highest stakes is the story about Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in Texas and may have been innocent.
On structure:
I spend a lot of time on it. I was a very bad newspaper writer. I never could do inverted pyramids and get the important information up top. I tend to think in stories naturally, as if I were sitting down to tell someone the story. I do think a lot about structure and to try to find a compelling way to tell a story. I spend a lot of time doing very elaborate outlines and think a good deal about structure and when information should be revealed.
On paring back when there is too much material:
Even when you’re doing magazine stories that are very long by the standards of magazine writing, you have to be somewhat ruthless with digressions. Because I do a lot of research, and I’m very obsessive about my research, especially when there are elements of history, one of the things I like to do is to deepen them through texture and history. If I’m doing a story on the water tunnels, you’ll learn the whole history of how these tunnels were built and the history of the sandhogs digging them.
The trick is to insert the amounts of this material that will help and deepen and enrich a story without bogging it down. I almost invariably write too much on the history but put it all in there and then go back and ruthlessly say, “What’s essential? How can I tighten it so that it doesn’t overwhelm the story?”
Even though Grann is talking about longer magazine pieces, the same tactics apply to most any piece of newspaper enterprise writing, good storytelling at any length, and fall into the tasks and skills embodied in the Five Stages of a Story model.
Writing stuff: Dependent clause openings — no!
“Writing stuff” is a collection of small but enduring points on how to improve writing. Pick one. Give it a try. Pick another. Carry on.
Want to drain your writing of focus and energy? Use dependent clause openings as much as possible. I was reminded of this recently while editing a profile.
The profile used the “layer cake” approach, alternating scenes with short blocks of background information. Shifting back and forth between the scenes, where narrative storytelling techniques are required, and the straight news prose of the background blocks made the damage caused by dependent clause openings all the more vivid.
Dependent clauses hurt straight news prose. But they occur all the time as part of the larger fog of “journalese” and the faux authority of hackneyed news writing. In this case the young reporter was simply switching material but not voice and the dependent clauses were everywhere.
One element of strong narrative writing is the use of concise active voice sentences. Action unfolds. People do things, react to things, and the reader follows the stream of action. Unless they start running into constructions like this:
For the past two years, Cooper has given the gallery a whole new image by featuring local artists willing to take chances.
A simple fix would be:
Cooper spent the past two years giving the gallery a whole new image by featuring local artists willing to take chances.
Better might be:
Cooper featured artists the past two years who were willing to take chances. The shows created a whole new image for the gallery.
The “journalese” voice at its worst is a dull report, a string of facts, too often strung together in long sentences where the real point is lost. One way to combat that and force yourself to write shorter, most vibrant sentences is to take out those dependent clause openings and see where the action leads.
Video for web vs. TV
In a short but fascinating item and video interview on Beet.TV, Mary Hockaday, Head of the BBC Newsroom, sketched out a notion of video shot for the web taking on a “show and tell” format that would be different from video shot for TV broadcast in the more familiar reporter stand-up / voiceover format. Hockaday sees an emerging format in which a reporter delivers more of an unscripted tour of the scene or situation.
She makes a good case, which then raises good questions about training reporters and videographers in this approach, including the art of improvising and how to anticipate the scope of the segment in the larger context of the web presentation.
Newspaper videos that flop
Colin Mulvany offers a sharp summary of all things wrong with newspaper videos, coming off the annual NPPA Best of Photojournalism Multimedia contest. High on his list is storytelling.
Many still photographers have not transitioned their storytelling skills effectively to video. Editing a video story is different from editing still photos for a newspaper picture story. With video, you have to master the fundamentals of sequencing and audio before you can tell an effective story in video. Too many still photojournalists have dipped their toes in the video world with limited training and it shows.
He also cites poor structure and takes a second look at the power of good scripted narration.
Structure and especially narrative structure are among the core skills to be taught as any part of storytelling training.
Earlier, an ongoing series of posts on storytelling.
