Who Says Johnny Can’t Write (A Good Story)?
I’m tired of reading how American students lag behind their international counterparts on the academic front.
Johnny can’t write.
Johnny can’t add.
Johnny can’t spell.
Even The Wall Street Journal has piled on with an article which highlights that only 23 percent of the 2009 high school graduates taking the ACT admissions test have the skills to succeed in college.
Enough already.
There’s plenty about today’s youth to prompt optimism.
In fact, one of my colleagues John Radewagen pointed me to a listing of metaphors and analogies purportedly from high school essays that - how shall I say it - show a certain “creativity.”
I’ve pulled out my favorites:
“She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.”
Shrewd to align storytelling with a timely topic like food contamination. But why Canadian beef? If you’re striving for the exotic angle, should have gone with Argentinean stuff.
“She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.”
The blending of Lauren Bacall and Old Yeller makes for narrative you don’t see every day.
“Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.”
On one hand, you shouldn’t feel like you’re taking the SAT to figure out a love story. On the other hand, the ambiguity pulls you in because you can’t be 100 percent sure when the lovers will actually collide.
“He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant and she was the East River.”
You don’t often see young authors pursue the mafia genre. While not exactly Mario Puzo, the personification of the East River shows promise.
“It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.”
You have to admit, fathers armed with chainsaws and the like deliver stronger imagery than men running around with wood paddles.
The future of storytelling is indeed in good hands.
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Insights into BusinessWeek Philosophy and Storytelling
I have to give credit to BusinessWeek’s Executive Editor John Byrne.
He got the engagement religion and has never wavered in prostelyzing the message.
While the BusinessWeek pages — both print and the digital variety — serve as the pulpit for most of Byrne’s communications beyond the BW corridors, he penned a op-ed for The Christian Science Monitor last September. It’s a revealing look at a philosophy in transforming BusinessWeek.com into a platform in which community, not content, is really the lead pin.
The CSM piece takes us behind-the-scenes in the creation of BusinessWeek’s workplace issue last August which was largely reader-generated. Naturally there were lessons learned, not the least being:
“… a reader’s ability to offer a smart, impassioned response to a problem, especially about something as personal as their job and career, rarely translates into an ability to write a long-form piece. Remember, they’re not pros.”
I might have overstated the same issue calling it “amateur hour” in my July post “Transforming the Engaged Reader Into a Journalist,” but the point remains it’s all a bit of an experiment.
Last week, Byrne joined in the Twitter #Editorchat with a full transcript available of all the participants.
To make it easy, we’ve isolated Byrne’s comments at the end of this post with what I consider to be the most noteworthy ones in bold.
A couple quick comments –
Byrne’s remark that “…journalists aren’t creating enough gold which I define as original, unique stories that really add value” represents an opportunity for communicators.
But a news release that sits in the public domain the minute a distribution service cuts it loose is not gold. It’s not even copper. The gold comes from the varied elements of storytelling, which requires a different approach (and different mentality) in the creation of content.
I also like Byrne’s imagery of an “intellectual fireplace around which the most meaningful conversations occur.”
For communicators, the opportunity lies in participating in the conversation as a peer and facilitating the engagement of companies.
Needless to say, such a scenario is more satisfying than “pummeling” a reporter to cover a news announcement.
Byrne’s Twitter #Editorchat
1. That’s all very exciting and challenging. Opportunity exists when things are growing or when they’re falling apart. #editorchat
2. You can become an entrepreneur. You can engage your readers as true partners. You can change the very nature of journalism. #editorchat
3. We spent too much time whining about the changes out there and not enough time taking advantage of new opportunities. #editorchat
4. Never before have journalists had the advantage of having their own printing presses to do their own thing. #editorchat
5. Never before have journalists had access to so many tools to perform their jobs more creatively than now. #editorchat
6. Despite all the turmoil and pain, this is an incredibly exhilarating time in journalism. #editorchat
7. One last thought, unless you have a few last questions. #editorchat
8. @fixin2 I’m afraid you won’t have to. There time is limited. They’ll be gone before you know it. #editorchat
9. You already have a good group of them, showing us the way from the HuffPo to GigaOm to Drudge, TechCrunch, GreenBiz, Politico. #editorchat
10. There will be many Born to the Web enterprises over the next few years that will teach the mainstream media a thing or two. #editorchat
11. @jeffjarvis True but there are a lot of other ideas that we’d be better at. #editorchat
12. @dkemper They will thrive because publishers will have money to pay them. Google part is connecting customers with merchants. #editorchat
13. @MaryKnudson That’s the role of an editor. #editorchat
14. So figuring out how to use smart phones in an interactive way is an important part of the future. #editorchat
15. @MikeLizun Mobile is key. I can foresee a day when most people will get their news via mobile device and not TV. Not far away. #editorchat
16. @RBLevin Totally agree. Media brands need to become direct marketers and also create new products that people will pay for. #editorchat
17. @BaileyMcC Not really. Under sponsorship, you may get more coverage of this or that. But it shouldn’t be influenced by a sponsor #editorchat
18. @shortformblog I pretty much agree with you. Our brand still stands for something but the competition is amazing now. #editorchat
19. It’s a very different competitive world. #editorchat
20. And, of course, WSJ, Fortune and Forbes online. Also The Economist, The Financial Times, the biz section of the NYT, etc. #editorchat
21. The biz sections of the HuffPo, Salon, The Atlantic, biz & economic blogs, AmericanExpress Open, etc. #editorchat
22. Today, we compete against Yahoo Finance, MSN Money, AOL Money & Finance, CNBC.com, Reuters.com, Bloomberg.com. #editorchat
23. We used to live in a nice little world with finite competition: WSJ, Fortune & Forbes. #editorchat
24. BW is not about hyper-local. We need to provide original, useful analysis that helps people get ahead in biz. #editorchat
25. @amandachapel I know a highly experienced journalist who now works for a monthly $500 draw and is paid by page views. #editorchat
26. HuffPo’s plan is a smart one. If the local newspaper doesn’t do it, they will. But local entrepreneurs will have the advantage. #editorchat
27. People want and need that information in a timely way and a hyper-local site can do it.
28. And then there are local sports–high school, college, Little League, soccer, etc. #editorchat
29. Parents want to know how their children are being educated. #editorchat
30. In every community, taxpayers want to know how their money is being spent. #editorchat
31. @AlbertMaruggi The salaries will be lower, except for the entrepreneurs who start these sites. #editorchat
32. @colorsign You’re talking ideology. We have no ideology at BW. #editorchat
33. They have to acquire enough information about the community & people that they can deliver leads to local businesses. #editorchat
34. Ultimately, I think local newspapers can only largely survive if they become local Googles. #editorchat
35. Some of that content will be produced by citizens. Some by professional journalists. #editorchat
36. I think hyper-local sites have a good future and that should mean more community journalism. #editorchat
37. Right now, though, it’s hard to imagine us having a media boom, no less a media bubble. #editorchat
38. And it will result in a media bubble. Part of the logic is based on the removal of the big costs of production & distribution. #editorchat
39. A new generation of entrepreneur/journalists will emerge to lead this boom. #editorchat
40. It will largely occur through entrepreneurship and the ease of entry into the business via the Net. #editorchat
41. He maintains that within three years, there will be a media boom. #editorchat
42. I had a fascinating discussion this afternoon with our chief economist Mike Mandell. #editorchat
43. Transformation is really hard and painful. That’s why a lot of players aren’t going to make it. #editorchat
44. All these things prevent incumbents from embracing the transformational changes they need to survive and succeed. #editorchat
45. And they think that their competitors will die and therefore they’ll be able to charge for content. #editorchat
46. They think that some day online advertising will offset the print decline and help support a broken print model. #editorchat
47. So they cling to the hope that print advertising will come back. #editorchat
48. Problem is, most people in media cling to those three absolutes as if they are white lies and don’t change. #editorchat
49. The upshot: Nothing less than radical transformation is necessary to succeed in the future. #editorchat
50. 3) Subscribers will generally not pay for content unless it’s original, unique value-added. #editorchat
51. 2) Online advertising cannot offset the print decline or save a print product. Too much online inventory from too many rivals. #editorchat
52. 1) Print advertising will not come back. That means single-digit declines from here on in represent victory, with some exceptions. #editorchat
53. I think there are three absolutes in today’s media world. You can argue any of them but I maintain they’re pretty much true. #editorchat
54. @a2editor And what’s surprising is that it had served a smart and vibrant community in Ann Arbor. #editorchat
55. It’s a tough time to be a journalist today. So there are a lot of very worried people in the biz. #editorchat
56. An individual slideshow generates the most traffic largely because there are more pages to see. #editorchat
57. But newspapers and magazines that deliver unique value will make it. They just have to change–dramatically. #editorchat
58. Last year, more than 500 magazine titles in the U.S. went kaput. #editorchat
59. That said, we’re going into a very painful and difficult transition that will see a lot of newspapers go out of business. #editorchat
60. Denver & Seattle were two-newspaper towns and the fattest ones won the war. #editorchat
61. We had victims of what Warren Buffett called “The Survival of the Fattest.” #editorchat
62. I think it’s premature to write the obituary for the American newspaper. In both Denver and Seattle….#editorchat
63. We’ve been able to quadruple the monthly video streams with this new strategy with no increase in resources & fewer videos. #editorchat
64. If you put the video in your most highly trafficked stories and you make sure it’s not redundant, you integrate it all. #editorchat
65. We’re trying to integrate video with text, placing complementary videos inside stories to change the user experience. #editorchat
66. I think they use the computer screen like a 1950s TV set by siloing off video clips. #editorchat
67. We have an interesting video strategy. Most sites silo off their video into some sort of ghetto. #editorchat
68. Good question on what becomes a story, a video, a slideshow, a podcast, a narrated photo essay, etc. #editorchat
69. Online, you can keep coming back as if you were writing for a daily newspaper. And you can do more series reporting online. #editorchat
70. Most magazine writers tackle a topic in one story and walk away from it for space reasons. #editorchat
71. I think one secret of online journalism, at least from the perspective of a magazine writer, is that it allows you to cover every twist. …
72. Online only stories are usually shorter and more to the point. But that’s not always true. #editorchat
73. If we’re quoting from a Tweet stream, our policy is to ask the user if we can do so–particularly if it’s a non-public person. #editorchat
74. I’m greatly influenced by reader feedback. We’ve corrected stories on it. And we’ve done many stories based on reader ideas. #editorchat
75. We don’t have a formal policy on Twitter and some writers prefer to keep their accounts private and personal. #editorchat
76. And we’re employing everything from Ning to Facebook, Flickr and YouTube to engage and interact with readers. #editorchat
77. We now have nearly 30 blogs, over 40 editors and writers who tweet, 4,400 videos on the site, a dozen podcasts. #editorchat
78. @rebeccalweber The beauty of online is that there is no limit to the voices or people who can participate in “letters.” #editorchat
79. That’s another reason engagement is key. The closer you get to your audience the more likely you are to make better judgments. #editorchat
80. Editors are constantly screening ideas and stories to get more gold but it’s an imperfect process. #editorchat
81. Of our total audience, about 38% are online only; 31% magazine only & 31% are both online and print. #editorchat
82. Online readers also earn more than print readers and are more likely to be female. #editorchat
83. There’s overlap in our print and online readers but generally our online users are 10 years younger and more highly educated. #editorchat
84. You can’t expect to be paid for commoditized journalism. How many Bernie Madoff pleads guilty stories can anyone read. #editorchat
86. User engagement has become a buzz phrase of sorts. But few are really walking the talk. #editorchat
85. I think journalists aren’t creating enough gold–which I define as original, unique stories that really add value. #editorchat
87. We need to understand the people we’re writing for and open up the process of journalism to improve our ability to serve them. #editorchat
88. Most journalists get their respect and their reinforcement from colleagues–not the people who consume their writing. #editorchat
89. It’s really not about getting free content as much as it is about having respect for your audience that u want them as partners. #editorchat
90. The result: all that interaction was used to inform the reporting of the story and we ended up w a cover that really resonated. #editorchat
91. Their feedback was played via hyperlinks in the old story as he began reporting his new piece on social media. #editorchat
92. Steve used his own blog to ask readers how things had changed since that last cover. #editorchat
93. It was actually an update from a cover he did more than three years earlier on blogging. #editorchat
It was the most successful story of the year for us, generating the most traffic and comments–well over 4,000. #editorchat
95. Another great example from Baker was his cover story last year: “Social Media Will Change Your Business.” #editorchat
96. What digital journalism really does is allow journalists to have a different and transformed relationship with readers. #editorchat
97. I also think the single biggest misconception about digital journalism is that it means multi-media. #editorchat
98. Editors and writers need to understand how to create and build communities and then how to serve them. That’s part of the job. #editorchat
99. It created terrific engagement among readers, seeded an audience for the story, and was truly innovative. #editorchat
100. Early last year when he did a story on Twitter, Steve tweeted the topic sentences and asked tweeps to fill in the rest. #editorchat
101. My favorite example is from one of our senior writers Steve Baker who has a blog called blogspotting on our site. #editorchat
102. And encouraging reader ideas for stories does indeed give you smart insight into what your readers are keenly interested in. #editorchat
103. You’re right. There is no such thing as a static story anymore. Every story is alive and extended by virtue of this partnership. #editorchat
104. Deeply engaging readers and converting them to partners is essential to induce loyalty and return visits. #editorchat
105. 2) Behavioral targeting advertising–which undermines contextual advertising that has long supported journalism. #editorchat
106. 1) Search–which is transactional and undermines the relationships that media brands have with their audiences. #editorchat
107. People often ask me why this is important. It’s simple. There are two trends out there that will make media brands extinct.
108. Those discussions, involving readers and an editor or writer, are as valuable as the journalism that is produced. #editorchat
109. And at the end when the story becomes an intellectual fireplace around which the most meaningful conversations occur. #editorchat
110. To the middle where you tell your readership what you’re working on and ask them for suggestions on sourcing and other issues. #editorchat
111. To a process that embraces the user at every stage, from idea generation when you ask your readers for their best story ideas. #editorchat
112. For us, this is all part of how journalism is changing from a product handed down by reporters to an audience. #editorchat
113. “You often tweet about user-generated story ideas. How important are blogs and user comments in generating topics?” #editorchat
114. I’m happy to take questions but let me start the ball rolling with one from Editorchat’s blog. #editorchat
115. I’m reminded of chats I moderated back in the mid-1990s on AOL when BW first went online and we did a lot of B-school things.
1 comment
Blast Magazine’s Media Kit Tells A Story
One of the last places you’d expect to see the art of storytelling is where a publication sells its advertising.
Even one of the bastions of high-brow reading, The Atlantic, - home to Malcolm Gladwell and other marquee-name storytellers - offers a fairly mundane sales pitch:
The Atlantic is America’s leading destination for brave thinking and bold ideas that matter. The Atlantic engages its print, online and live audiences with breakthrough insights into the worlds of politics, business, the arts, and culture. With exceptional talent deployed against the world’s most important and intriguing topics, The Atlantic is the source of opinions, commentary, and analysis for America’s most influential individuals who wish to be challenged, informed and entertained.
Very corporate.
About what you’d expect to read in any company boilerplate after multiple revisions grind out the personality.
That’s why Blast magazine’s sales approach caught my attention starting with the kickoff:
For the love of God, SPONSOR US. We’re really freakin good, we swear.
We’ve aleady covered “freakin verus freaking,” but suffice it to say this is not a vanilla opener.
Check out the rest:
Blast is a lifestyle and tech magazine focused on us spoiled, rotten Generation Y kids born between 1978 and sometime in the early 90s. (And a few Generation X holdovers — think MTV before “The Hills,” Atari and baseball with long hair, mustaches and no steroids.) We’ve experienced Nintendo, AOL when it was dialup and all the girls in the chat rooms were models, Windows (or MAC), Doom on a 3.5″ floppy, boy bands, iPods, iPhones and college degrees that stuck us with a mortgage in student loans.
Blast’s contributors do music, movies, theater, video games, sports, fashion, sex, food and liquor for starters. We write about some of it too.
Blast is online. Don’t ask for the print edition.
And, seriously folks, we’re not a blog. We do use WordPress as our content management system, but WordPress is SO much more than a blogging platform.
Blast is a form of convergence journalism, looking to combine the quality of print journalism (and print journalists) with the convenience and unlimited space of the web. Where else can you find a 2,000-word video game review or a 3,000-word band interview? Maybe Rolling Stone. Yeah, we’re not as good as Rolling Stone.
Where else will you find coverage of both the 2008 presidential race and the latest breaking news from the porn industry? Maybe Maxim. We’re better.
We try to be equally geared toward guys and girls — forgive us if it doesn’t seem that way, but we think we balance the pregnant porn star coverage pretty well with the latest from Kaki King and Tegan and Sara.
Good stuff.
Self-deprecating with an edge.
Funny.
You come away knowing the publication’s personality and what they want to be when they grow up.
By its own admission, it might not measure up to Rolling Stone’s editorial, but Blast definitely tops the Rolling Stone media kit.
4 comments
Storytelling Through The Journalist’s Eyes
I came across an enlightening piece called “Becoming a Storyteller, Not Just a Reporter” (you might need to scroll down to reach the article).
While the entire piece is worth a read, the following advice caught my attention:
Don’t limit your inquiry, or your thinking, to the basics of journalism: Who, what, when, where, why, how. Think in terms of story elements: setting, character, plot, conflict, climax, resolution, dialogue, theme.
Yes.
This captures the essence of how journalism is striving for a greater entertainment quotient.
I studied journalism at the University of Arizona on the heels of Watergate, which in turn caused a stampede of “Woodstein” wannabes to the country’s J-schools. To prune the glamour seekers, the professors relentlessly preached the who-what-when-where-why-how principle - a bit ironic considering the drama that culminated with the resignation of President Nixon.
Today, this principle frames the article, with the storytelling elements outlined above often shaping the content.
That’s why communicating with only the facts falls short of meeting the needs of today’s media.
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The Engima of Business Journalism, The Economist
Cloaked with a veneer of secrecy that leaves readers to wonder “Who the hell wrote that article?” The Economist takes pride in baffling the garden-variety PR person.
Its editorial decisions can at times seem quirky for the sake of being quirky. I mean, do we really need 499 words devoted to ornithology and a bio-acoustic monitor that can distinguish the chirps from 110,000 species of birds from the hiss of a snake?
Yet, contrary to popular belief, this is not some niche publication only serving the British intellectualazzi. Its readership tips 1.3 million with about half of those copies ending up on American doorsteps.
For this very reason, when we supported the announcement of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk a few years ago, we zeroed in on The Economist to tell the in-depth story. It didn’t hurt that our homework revealed that Economist technology editor Tom Standage had penned a book that also took liberties with the same topic, “The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine.”
But more than serendipity, our continued success with The Economist comes down to building the right content that aligns with the book’s approach to storytelling. I touched on the importance of anecdotes using one example from The Economist back in July.
Taking this a step further, we analyzed the tech-related articles (list of articles included at the end of this post) in The Economist, covering the April through November 2008 issues.
Seventeen percent of the content fell under the anecdotal umbrella.
It just goes to show that even high-brow business journalism depends on the amusing, provocative or downright weird to keep the reader’s interest.
Economist Articles Analyzed:
November 14, 2008
November 5, 2008
October 29, 2008
October 22, 2008
October 15, 2008
October 8, 2008
October 1, 2008
September 24, 2008
September 17, 2008
September 10, 2008
September 2, 2008
August 27, 2008
August 20, 2008
August 12, 2008
August 5, 2008
July 30, 2008
July 23, 2008
July 16, 2008
July 9, 2008
July 2, 2008
June 18, 2008
June 11, 2008
June 4, 2008
The FAST track to better health
May 28, 2008
May 21, 2008
May 14, 2008
May 7, 2008
April 30, 2008
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