Creating content -- any content, for any platform -- requires decisions about both content and form. That's an inescapable fact.
This seems laughable now, but at one point in newspaper journalism (a world I inhabited for more than 20 years), many newsrooms had opposing camps of "word people" and "visual people" that would engage in raging debates over which form should have primacy in presenting the content. Such debates led to development of techniques such as the W-E-D (Writing-Editing-Design) model developed by the Poynter Institute and the Maestro concept from Buck Ryan. Simply put, these ideas emphasized that both content and form were integral to telling a story in the most effective way.
Fast-forward to now, and it's clear that the integration of form and content in presenting content/telling stories is an established practice. In fact, one of the fundamental lessons in writing for online presentation is that text itself has a visual component, and should not be presented as a series of gray blocks the way it is possible to do in print.
The idea that form plays a key role even makes intuitive sense. One of my favorite analogies in that respect is the difference between newspaper and TV reporting. At its inception, TV news was just talking heads reading newspaper-style stories on the screen. But it did not take long for TV journalism to evolve to packages consisting of reporter "standup" plus narrative over background footage combined with interviews and other natural sound video. The nature of the televised medium dictated a different form, which was more effective because it incorporated things TV could do that print could not. In similar fashion, the characteristics of the online environment require rethinking of the techniques of presenting content.
At its inception, TV news was just talking heads reading newspaper-style stories on the screen.
New approaches =
new platforms
The interactive and interconnected nature of web presentation, of course, makes it possible do present things in that medium not possible in print or traditional broadcast. New models for storytelling are leading to new platforms devoted to taking advantage of interactive, interconnected capabilities for inventive form/content combinations.
Near the top of my "to-do" list this summer is investigating some of these new-look platforms, and the ones I want to start with are Fold and Shorthand Social. Both of these have already garnered attention, and appear to be solid entrants to the world of enhanced storytelling.
Shorthand Social
Shorthand Social is affiliated with the new Shorthand story-development tool used effectively by the likes of the BBC, Australian Broadcasting Co. and The Guardian. The Shorthand stories by these organizations feature parallax scrolling and other neat embedded content to present text, images and video in uniquely engaging ways. Shorthand Pro offers powerful development tools for organizations such as these to create such presentations — but with a hefty price tag.
Shorthand Social, which started out life as Shorthand Immersive, is a free-to-use "lite" version that makes some of the capability of its professional sibling available to individuals and small organizations. But, taking a cue from Medium, it's been given the name Social because its developers want to create an engaged community of readers around the stories posted there. Logging in, for example, is done through Twitter.
I see the value in that, of course, but as noted from the form/content theme in the introduction to the post, I am mostly interested in exploring the multimedia capabilities with an eye toward perhaps having my students use it for some of their projects. And, of course, it's the tool I am using for this presentation, which is a modification of a blog post originally made on Wordpress.
(For more on the Shorthand Social organization from the organization itself, check out its Insights page.)
Fold
Fold, developed by the MIT Media Lab, uses a variant on the increasingly popular cards web design model to create stories told with surrounding context. It's also free to use .
The basic story is linear, but text, images, video, page links and the like can be added alongside the text — literally growing out from either side in a series of cards — to provide additional information. A very cool feature is a small schematic of the entire presentation in a lower corner of the screen. It shows where you are in the overall story and which cards are currently visible, and also how many "sideways" cards are associated with your current location. It's not navigable, just illustration, for now. Clicking on it yields a message that "Zoom-out mode is coming soon.) A hint of what that will look like is visible in the editor.
This piece by MIT Media Lab staffer Matt Carroll does a good job of explaining Fold in more detail.
(And, for good measure, here's a version of this story in Fold.)
A caveat, though
While I see great promise in these new tools and techniques for telling stories in news and different ways, Carroll brings up a couple of really important points with regard to them. After wondering aloud about the impact on readers who have to work harder to access the information (that's point 1), he writes:
It also makes you think hard about how to write a story. Do you want to include that little piece of background information in the main story? Or should it be placed in a contextual card? How much context is too much? Will people read the context cards I’ve created, or will they see it as extra work to avoid?
That sounds like a modern version of the old form/content debate, does it not? We need both to tell modern stories effectively. But as always, the form of the presentation must enhance the content, not overwhelm or distract from it. it’s an important caution to keep in mind for those using these new tools.
