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When I pulled up to the food pantry, I was greeted with this chaotic scene. There were dozens of residents out there. They had bags of food and bags of clothing and household items that they were ready to donate. And there, in the center, of it all was LoQuator Dinkins, handing out orders to her volunteers and chatting with her new donors. It was amazing to see — there were people from different races and different ethnicities. There were people with different religious backgrounds, who had all come because they’d read this story and they wanted to help save her food pantry. When I walked up to LoQuator, she was chatting with a man who had driven several hours from a wealthy posh suburb to make a donation large enough that would cover that $3,500 electric bill. She told that man he had been sent to her by God. He said: “I don’t believe in God. I believe in good people.” The scene that I saw that day was so compelling and so inspiring and moving to me, it reminded me of the power of journalism. I went back to the office and I wrote about it too. You see, it’s those types of moments that keep me from becoming cynical. It’s those moments that help remind me that as journalists, we have the power to empower....
Anyone who’s taken a shortcut and skipped the primer while painting a room knows the kind of results you can get. Uneven. Unpolished. The primer sets the stage for a beautiful wall.
That’s kind of the idea behind the storytelling website Primer Stories, says Tim Lillis, one of the creative minds behind the site, which mixes medium-form written pieces with lots of eye-catching visual effects.
He thinks the stories should be just long enough to prime readers on the subject – about 1,000 words — while also acting as a primer of intellectual paint.
Story topics can be ambitious, but Lillis and co-creator Joe Alterio were intent on crafting narratives that are digestible for both longform lovers and listicle lushes.
“We realized that somewhere along the line, the important ideas were losing the battle of marketability,” Alterio says. “So, how do we give them a little bit of that flash while still retaining that core, essential part of the idea?”
As tech watchers debate the overuse of interactive tools in stories David Sarno says light interactive news stories don't go far enough. As a tech reporter at the Los Angeles Times David Sarno found himself frustrated that newspaper stories only engage “one lousy sense,” as he puts it. That would be sight.
Why couldn’t they be as interactive and entertaining as a video game like Grand Theft Auto, where a player can walk around a virtual city, drive a car, walk into a store (and, yes, kill people), and essentially have some control over a re-created reality?
Even when the iPad came out in 2010 (an event that Sarno prolifically covered for The Times) and made print media more touchable, Sarno wasn’t impressed. “At that time, and still largely today, what news organizations and magazines are doing is reproducing the print version on the screen,” he tells Fast Company. “It’s like two steps better than scanning in the print version and putting it on the iPad screen.”...
A few years ago, a bunch of us were sitting around the front porch of this crumpled old resort in the Catskills, knocking back drinks and talking shop. I can’t remember how it began, but when the sun went down we developed a game: Tell a story in a minute. It started off cool enough, and some of the kids were spinning fine ones, and quick. But pretty soon we were shouting at each other – “Shorter!” – and we were going shorter, and shorter, and shorter, until the rule had become: Tell a story in a couple of sentences....
Great writing and storytelling inspiration for all... The Great Zucchini has a secret. And in “The Peekaboo Paradox,” Gene Weingarten exhumes the history that haunts the most popular children’s entertainer in Washington, D.C. The story, which ran in January 2006, is the best thing ever written by the Washington Post’s two-time Pulitzer winner. (Surprisingly enough, Weingarten agrees with this statement.) “A children’s performer? Really?” you might wonder as you start the piece, but Weingarten is already there, waiting for you....
New homes for stories that fall between a book and an article... ...There are other new places where the long article-cum-short book has a chance. Sites like Longform.org and Longreads.com are compiling richer and more thorough stories, and Byliner’s own website, Byliner.com, is updated daily with summaries and links to literary nonfiction works, some published decades ago, available for free. The site currently points readers to more than ten thousand stories. Bryant describes Byliner.com as “curatorial,” to use the phrase du jour, as the site guides users toward worthy long-form material. It links to sites where the pieces are already available, or to pieces that authors have asked it to include. The owners talk about it as a “discovery engine” for finding authors you like, sort of like Pandora finds music. The site is also, of course, a distribution platform for Byliner Originals and generates a small amount of money when a user buys a book off of the Byliner site on Amazon. Eventually, the plan is to pursue advertising and sponsorship opportunities. But Byliner has other sources of funding, including an angel investor, says Bryant, a “social media Silicon Valley person....”
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Get complex ideas, beautifully explained and delivered to your inbox during a season.
A few times a year, we'll deliver a season of incredible bespoke interactive experiences that will inform, engage, and delight. It may be an RPG about climate change, a story about self-immolation with musical accompaniment, or a visual compliment to a popular podcast, but one thing's for sure – it will be awesome.
Attending a wedding in Ireland several years ago, Mark Little saw fellow guests looking at their phones, as they learned that Michael Jackson had died. Soon, the group was dancing to Thriller as a tribute to the late star. That dance, Little said, happened 15 minutes before the Los Angeles Times had even officially announced Jackson’s death. At that moment, he said he thought, “Wow, that’s the way news is being consumed.”
As the founder of Storyful — a global news agency that finds, collects, and verifies social-media content — Little has served as a leader of our massive information shift: How is news changing? How are stories changing? And what are the ethics involved as traditional media outlets transition from being the gatekeeper to being part of a worldwide reporting network in which every citizen can contribute to — or even completely tell — our world’s most important stories?...
Innovative storytelling, audience engagement, and financial flexibility are key ingredients for newspapers to cope with pressures from competitors, budget constraints, and the speed at which technology is changing."It came as no surprise when The New York Times took home a Pulitzer for 'Snow Fall' - the immersive multimedia package impressed journalists and web designers alike with its seamless integration of text, audio, videos, photos and interactive graphics."The comments in "Trends in Newsrooms 2013," the World Editors Forum's report on the state of the news industry, about the attention-grabbing content, underlined the importance of stories that jump out at readers....
Steve Jobs resurrected Apple by slaying five dragons. See how he did it. A really inspiring article and great way to celebrate a technology marketing genius and innovator...
Is integration of the personal narrative helpful or harmful in reporting? Just like the magazine industry itself, reporting styles are evolving. Aggregated and link journalism is plentiful; yellow journalism will most likely never go away; long-form journalism holds a nostalgic power, despite increasingly Tweet-ified attention spans; and now, the era of “me” journalism appears to be here for the long haul....
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Journalist Lolly Bowean on Chicago community: "I’m here to remind you today that great journalism can also find ordinary, regular people and find the extraordinary in what they do."