The Innovation Journalism (InJo) Conference at Stanford kicked off yesterday.

Gathering 100+ journalists, academics and the like to scrutinize the telling of the innovation story makes for a lively dialog.

The opening session featured David Nordfors, founder of InJo, interviewing Krishna Bharat, the creator of Google News. Dubbed a “fireside chat,” I’m pleased to report both participants passed on the cardigan sweater (and no one lit the Duraflame log).

Quite frankly, I wasn’t sure what to expect.

Putting Google on this stage struck me akin to Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao keynoting an ACLU dinner.

But everyone was cordial if not downright polite.

Bharat started by sharing how the 9/11 tragedy served as the catalyst for Google News. He realized it took considerable effort and time to gather a cross-section of stories on the attack. That backdrop gave rise to Google News.

Nordfors tried to nudge Bharat out of his comfort zone and Timothy Dickinson from Rolling Stone probed about Google’s responsibility to the business of journalism. While Bharat stayed on script for the most part, I thought there were a few comments that offered hints on where Google is taking the platform.

One quick caveat - I did not record the session and my note-taking is not industrial grade. I’ve done my best to capture Bharat’s words.

Bharat: Journalists should worry about creating content and leave it to others to get the content to the audience.

My Take: By leave it to others, I wasn’t sure if he meant a publication’s businesspeople or companies like Google. Regardless, journalists do worry about this issue since the online distribution of their content has undermined revenue generation and pink-slipped so many of their compadres.

One element that doesn’t get a lot of discussion is the more experienced journalists end up in the line of fire because of their higher salaries. During my morning workshop, Peter Lewis who many may remember from his Fortune days but is now a Knight Fellow in Journalism at Stanford, mentioned that CNN cut their entire science staff. As a result, the media property is forced to cover a crisis like the BP oil spill with generalists.

Bharat: Once you intersperse hard news with everything else, it’s tough for a publication to distinguish itself.

My Take: Google believes the hard news biz will go the way of auto manufacturing; i.e., a few deep-pocketed publishers with scale will own the space. I got the sense that Google anticipates the bulk of consolidation in the publishing industry has yet to occur. Now there’s a sobering thought.

Bharat: The process for purchasing journalism needs to become easier and simpler.

My Take: This one perplexed me. I’ve never been stumped by a publication’s subscription form, this from a person called “mechanically declined” by his brother. On the other hand, I got the vibe that Google aspires to become the PayPal for digital content.

If you’re interested in a deeper look, Mark Glaser interviewed Bharat back in February in the MediaShift story “Google News to Publishers: Let’s Make Love Not War.”

You can track the conference through Wednesday on Twitter at #injo7.  

One last point to share on Day 1 of the conference -

Nordfors explained that his program has been renamed the Stanford Center of Innovation and Communication.

The name change recognizes that the ecosystem surrounding innovation and communicating to the outside world encompasses a range of players, including PR.

After the dust settles from the conference, I hope to get time with Nordfors for an interview on his program and the general topic of storytelling.

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.

OK, it’s not exactly Shakespeare.

But it does raise a question for communication professionals. Namely, should cleverness or search engine optimization be the guiding principle in writing a news release headline?

I pondered this question after reading the interview conducted by Brian Pittman from the Bulldog Reporter with Meredith Artley, executive editor of LATimes.com.

Specifically, Artley shared:

“We have a graining program to help copy editors write headlines optimized for search. That means headlines that might have used metaphors or clever word usage in the past won’t work anymore — at least not for the website, because people don’t search for turns of phrases. They search for nouns and descriptors. Sure, this may take some of the ‘art’ out of the writing, but an artful headline that nobody sees is useless if you can’t find it on Google.”

Now there’s a sobering comment.

No matter how much drama, humanity and humor you bring to a headline, it’s all for naught if the words don’t resonate with the Google algorithm.

It turns out that this topic has been bandied about for some time, with one of the better posts coming from CNET with the header, “Newspapers search for Web headline magic.”

CNET makes the point that a Wall Street Journal article with the witty headline “Green Beans Comes Marching Home” - about Green Beans Coffee opening its cafe in the U.S. after serving overseas military bases - doesn’t cut it with the SEO generation.

In other words, if you’re looking for information about the intersection of coffee with military bases or soldiers, the takeoff on “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” means zilch to search engines.

As the news release has evolved from a tool for journalists to a form of communication to the average Joe/Joanne, it’s clear that SEO should rule the day at least for the headline.

This is one of those instances when the power of entertaining must give way to vanilla information.

Take a look at the following opening paragraph in a recent Economist article:

“The porters at Trinity College, Cambridge, were puzzled by the faded, handwritten letter. They did not recognise the addressee’s name, and opened the envelope. Inside was a note which appeared to suggest a meeting; perhaps even a date. But that meeting probably never took place. The letter had been posted in March 1950 – and had been lost in the mail for 56 years.”

It sounds like another round of postal service bashing. After all, 56 years to deliver a letter takes “slowness” to a new level. Instead, the mini story kicks off a piece on a new technology that uses the satellite-based
Global Positioning System.

The opening paragraph in a recent story in BusinessWeek goes even further:

“It’s an ordinary day on Pete Ferrell’s 7,000-acre ranch in the Flint Hills of southeastern Kansas. Meaning, it’s really windy. When he drives his silver Toyota Tundra out of the canyon where the ranch buildings nestle, the truck rocks from the gusts. Up on top of a ridge, surrounded by a sweeping vista of low hills, rippling grass, and towering wind turbines that make you feel like a mouse scampering underfoot, Ferrell carefully navigates into a spot where the wind won’t damage the doors when they’re opened. Then he points to an old-style windmill, used for pumping water, which was erected by his father decades earlier when the ranch was in the throes of a drought. “That’s the windmill that saved us in the ’30s,” he explains, his voice growing husky with emotion.”

This is the type of stage setting you’d expect in fiction complete with the “voice growing husky with emotion.” Triggers an image of Lauren Bacall on the big screen.

Today’s business and trade journalists – including those from the technology sphere – are increasingly charged with bringing an entertainment dimension to their writing.

Yet, it can be a revealing exercise for a company to step back and examine the content being developed to crack these targets particularly the all-too-elusive business media.

Facts and figures. Check.

Product features and benefits. Check.

But the elements that constitute good storytelling are often MIA.

Businesspeople tend to associate storytelling with fiction.

Yet, the same elements that make a book such as “Moby Dick” a compelling read - good versus evil, care for the characters, humor, etc. - have a place in the business world. Whether it’s a potential customer evaluating your product or a journalist probing your latest news, communicating information in a more entertaining fashion increases your likeability quotient.

And customers, journalists, job candidates and even gadflies gravitate toward companies they like.

Unfortunately, this concept around storytelling is counterintuitive to many business executives, particularly those coming from engineering orientations where science rules the day. I’m not suggesting you need to lose an appendage to a large mammal before anyone will notice you but the ability to build some drama in business communications is a means to capture attention.

That’s the idea behind this blog: To look at the art of storytelling through a business prism.

No doubt, most blog postings will draw from the media world - defining media as any from journalists to an individual with a virtual soapbox since the words are right there in the public domain to scrutinize. But this blog will strive to tackle the bigger challenge of communicating to the outside world in a more entertaining fashion.