The typical product review has a happy ending.

By that, I mean the end of a review usually calls out one product as the best choice.

In spite of the “happily every after” - at least for one company - you don’t associate the product review genre with storytelling.

Instead, these articles strive to clinically attach a value to different features and functions with the objective of helping potential buyers make their decisions.

That’s why a recent review by David Pogue in The New York Times caught my attention.

Anyone who touches the consumer electronics space knows Pogue and his gift for humor. His comparison of Windows Vista to the Mac OS back in 2006 - “I’m going to prove that Microsoft did not steal ideas from Mac OS 10″ - remains a classic and must-watch video:

But it’s interesting to see his quest for levity play out in a print product review called “Big Sensor, Tiny Camera, Nice Results” (don’t think Pogue wrote the headline; perhaps a byproduct of the SEO jockeys).

The review goes old school with the lead ‘graph:

Centuries ago, a young boy in Japan was preparing for a long journey. “You will need much drinking water,” said his master. “Construct a barrel that will catch the rain.”

You can almost sense David Carradine flashing back to his Grasshopper days, an allusion that keeps as the story unwinds:

After a quick run to his local Pagoda Depot for supplies, the boy built a large barrel, open at the top. When it rained, the barrel filled quickly.

“Good,” said the master. “Now pack it up.”

“But master,” the boy protested. “This barrel is much too big and heavy to take on my journey — it might not even qualify as carry-on! I need a much smaller, lighter container!”

Nice turn of a phrase, “Pagoda Depot.”

Sensing that an allegory is taking shape:

“A wise observation,” said the master.

“And yet,” said the boy, “a smaller container means a smaller opening, and it won’t catch nearly as much rain.”

And now, the payoff with Pogue intersecting Grasshopper with today’s digital dilemma:

The master nodded again. “Excellent, my son,” he said. “Now you understand the trade-off between digital S.L.R. cameras and pocket cameras. The S.L.R. is big and heavy, but it has a huge sensor that collects much light; you can get sharp photos even at twilight. The pocket camera has a tiny sensor that’s blurry in low light, but at least you won’t slip a disk trying to carry it around.”

The rest of the review offers the obligatory compare and contrast of several cameras.

Of course, every story must have an end.

Naturally, Pogue ties back to the drinking water quandary:

In the end, the boy began to cross Japan with only a tiny water flask on his back.

The master was aghast. “But you will die of thirst, my son!”

The boy smiled as he continued walking. “I’m not too worried about it, old man. Technology has a way of making all things possible.

Right. There’s no way a Japanese boy is going to call Kwai Chang Caine an “old man.”

But the boy saying “please don’t worry master” doesn’t quite have the same verve.

Like all master storytellers, Pogue expects us to suspend belief.

I’m OK with this for a product review that shakes up the status quo. 

There’s no question that photos like the one above that accompanied a New York Times article on China’s surging demand for coal accentuate storytelling.

In some cases, we’re actually seeing storytelling revolve around visuals like the seafood charticle in WIRED Magazine.

I think The New York Times does a particularly good job in building their stories around a strong narrative and compelling photographs. At a time when the photo staffs of newspapers have been decimated (to be kind), The Times augments its skeleton crew with other photo sources.

The photo of the chap shoveling coal comes from the European Pressphoto Agency. It fits perfectly with the opening graph of the NYT story:

Even as China has set ambitious goals for itself in clean-energy production and reduction of global warming gases, the country’s surging demand for power from oil and coal has led to the largest six-month increase in the tonnage of human generated greenhouse gases ever by a single country.  

Furthermore, two more photos round out The New York Times’ story on the China energy challenge, both secured from Reuters.

What does this mean for communications professionals?

It behooves us to strengthen our stories with compelling photography or other visuals.

In fact, one could make an argument that internal staff cutbacks create even more opportunity for companies to use photography to make a case for their stories with the media. 

By definition, there’s a feel-good element to a hero.

They overcome obstacles on their way to a positive outcome.

And if the hero starts out as an underdog a la “David versus Goliath” there’s even more of a reason to have a rooting interest.

The same concept holds true in business storytelling.

While we tend to think of a hero as bigger than life - Mother Theresa, the Dali Lama, Shrek, etc. - the hero in the context of a business story can bridge theory to reality.

A recent New York Times piece by Steve Lohr called “Making It All Compute” does exactly this under the umbrella of National Computer Science Education Week.

Before jumping into the NYT story, it’s worth rewinding the tape to the original news release:

WASHINGTON, D.C.—December 7, 2009— The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and its partners are launching Computer Science Education Week (CSEdWeek) to uncover and remedy the inadequacy of the nation’s computer science education system at the K-12 level.  While 5 of the top 10 fastest growing jobs are in computing-related fields, the percent of schools with rigorous high school computing courses fell from 40 percent to 27 percent from 2005 to 2009.  The last 60 years witnessed an extraordinary burst of innovation and talent that have produced a nation where most can scarcely remember life without computers.  Yet this innovation-based society is at risk if students are not learning fundamental computing knowledge in our nation’s schools.

Nothing particularly riveting or new about the fact that American kids continue to tune out science and math.

Is there a worse acronym than the Association for Computing Machinery, affectionately called ACM? The word “machinery” conjures up the image of a restaurant-grade mixer, not exactly an attention-getter for the under-20 crowd.

But Lohr uses the ACM news announcement as a springboard into the need to better package computer education, with three heroes showing the way starting with the chief information officer at Harvard Medical School:

Growing up in the ’70s, John Halamka was a bookish child with a penchant for science and electronics. He wore black horn-rimmed glasses and buttoned his shirts up to the collar… Dr. Halamka grew up to be something of a cool nerd, with a career that combines his deep interests in medicine and computing, and downtime that involves rock climbing and kayaking

Like the oxymoron, “cool nerd.”

Hard to miss the photo of Mr. Halamka wearing a hip black shirt under a sports coat. It’s not quite Steve Jobs with the mock black turtleneck, but in the same category.

We also learn about Kira Lehtomaki, who parlayed a love for art into a gig at Walt Disney Animation Studios where she draws on a computer with specialized graphics and modeling software.

And the story closes with high school senior Mario Calleros who jumped from playing computer games to an internship at UCLA where he helped build a smartphone application for navigating the campus.

I was particularly encouraged by this last vignette. There’s still hope for my own son to get more out of Madden than the ability to mimic sports announcers.

It’s these three “heroes,” Halamka, Lehtomaki and Calleros, who bring the NYT story to life. That’s what justifies the piece being on the front of the business page above the fold.

For stories with complexity, customers can often play a similar role in humanizing the content and, again, bridging the theory to reality.

When the New York Times hired Ashlee Vance, many enterprise computing PR folks rejoiced.

Tired of watching the Web 2.0 hotshots dominate business media stories on computing, they thought, “Finally. Here is a major daily bringing on Vance with the implied message that enterprise computing once again matters.”

Not exactly.

It was as if people forgot that Vance wasn’t coming out of Computerworld or Dr. Dobbs Journal. This was a guy who spent five plus years honing his entertainment chops at The Register, the book which proudly exclaims on its masthead, “Biting the hand that feeds IT.”

For Exhibit A, consider the 2008 Register “radio” wrap-up by Vance with the header “Bill Gates cried to make the world a better place” and classic Vance narrative:

Apparently, Bill Gates let some lass from 23 and Me have it when she tried to draw a link between vaccines and autism. Touchy stuff, I know. But Bill loves his vaccines.

No, this is not your garden variety trade journalism.

Where am I going with this?

Check out the Vance story which ran in The New York Times last week: “Minnesota’s Enormous Apples Computer.”

The story explains how the University of Minnesota took proceeds from licensing the “code” to Honeycrisp apples to help pay for a $6 million supercomputer.

Can you imagine the university’s computer scientists going door to door selling chocolate bars to raise this kind of dough? No way could they equal the windfall from the apple IP.

Plus, the story is humanized by explaining one potential application that would improve a surgeon’s game before an operation.

Scientists at the University of Minnesota have started looking into creating scans of hearts and brains that can then be translated into 3-D images on a computer. With such technology, a doctor could, for example, practice doing surgery on not just any heart but rather your heart ahead of the actual surgery.

Hard to argue with the upside of this one.

Vance closes by bringing the story back to fruit, noting that while the University did not maximize its revenue from the Honeycrisp, they’re projecting up to $30 million per year in licensing fees from its latest incarnation, the SweeTango.

Kudos to HP’s Erin Collopy and her Burson team (HP helped build the supercomputer) who set the stage for the piece and ensured Vance had access to the right people at the U of Minnesota.

Ironically, it was also a medical angle that landed one of our clients ILOG in The New York Times earlier in the year in another Vance story: “The Doctor Will B.R.M.S. You Now.”

Needless to say, business rules management software isn’t exactly a door opener into the business media.

Again, the technology was humanized by showing the benefits to hospital patients framed by the fact that 1.5 million people are hurt by medication mistakes annually, which adds $3.5 billion to the hospitals’ tab.

I thought we had nicely made the point with hard data, but Vance managed to extract a pile-on comment from the director of IT integration at Vanderbilt University Medical Center:

Even top-notch doctors miss key factors, and things slip through the cracks.

Now, that’s reassuring.

To close on the subject at hand -

Enterprise computing stories need that entertainment quotient and contrarian twist to play on the big stage.

And the jarring sound bite doesn’t hurt.

Siemens recently took its new high-speed train for a spin with reporters on board.

The story provides the perfect fodder to resurrect “Iron Reporter,” the forum in which we contrast how two reporters tell the same story.

Today’s challenge pits Andrew E. Kramer from The New York Times (“Siemens Fills Need for High-Speed Trains in Russia”) against Paul Glader from The Wall Street Journal (“High-Speed Rail Keeps Train Makers on Track”).

I’ll try to channel Alton Brown as we examine the all-important lead.

Kramer ties the story to intrigue and Russia’s quest for global relevance in the waning days of the Cold War:

In the last years of the cold war, the ultrasecret research institute that had designed the Soviet Union’s nuclear submarines received an unusual request: could it build a high-speed train?

The Soviet Union, despite its dependence on railroads, had fallen far behind Japan and Western Europe on high-speed transport. That the order came to the Rubin design bureau suggests that Moscow viewed catching up as a matter of national security.

The result of the little-known program was a slate-gray, round-nosed locomotive called the Sokol, Russian for falcon, that petered out soon after the Soviet Union did. The prototype achieved a top speed of only 143 miles an hour — hardly breaking a sweat by high-speed standards.

But the fall of the Falcon created an opening for Siemens.

Talk about doing your homework and connecting the dots.

On the other hand, Glader takes the approach of capturing an “all-aboard” moment:

As an engineer pulls the throttle, villagers track side gawk at the bullet-shaped train as it gathers speed. Soon, forests and wooden shacks are a blur as a dashboard display reads 250 kilometers an hour (155 miles per hour).

Good narrative for sure, but it pales against the depth of Karmer’s opener.

Further scrutinizing the Glader/Journal piece, we discover that the new Russian train from Siemens serves as a hook into the broader topic of the high-speed train business, with Hitachi and Bombardier as well as Siemens vying for the $182B pie.

This allows Glader to parachute into Spain, China, the UK and the U.S. (noting President Obama’s $13B in stimulus money earmarked for high-speed rail) to share market snapshots. As the GE watcher at the Journal, no surprise that Glader also devotes a graph to GE’s rail operation.

In short, Glader develops a follow-the-money story tying back to the $1B that Russian Railways will pony up for the Sapsan project.

He closes with ping-pong anecdotes, one for and one against fast trains:

“I’m sure they’ll push away aircraft,” says Alexander Dumnich, a captain of the famous Red Arrow train, which was introduced by Joseph Stalin in 1931 and pressed into military service during World War II.

Alexei Daibov, an auditor with PricewaterhouseCoopers in St. Petersburg, is more skeptical. “I travel by plane,” he says, expressing but he hopes a price war will lower the cost of plane tickets.

I would classify his narrative as perfunctory with the exception of calling out the train’s upscale interior design as “a change in Russia’s egalitarian rail tradition,” a clever tip to Dostoyevsky.

Back to Kramer and the NY Times -

Rather than address the world market for fast trains, he hypothesizes that Siemens’ end game is really the U.S., “the last laggard of the high-speed age.”

This opens the door to tidbits not in the public domain, such as Siemens repotting employees from its high-speed train division to Sacramento, and that the very same Sapsan connecting St. Peterburg and Moscow is in the running for the San Francisco to LA train trek.

And Kramer extracts a terrific quote colored against the backdrop of the ride:

The United States “is a developing country in terms of rail,” Ansgar Brockmeyer, head of public transit business for Siemens, said in an interview aboard the Russian test train, as wooden country homes and birch forests flickered by outside the window.

It also turns out that the Sapsan incorporates a technological breakthrough. The train has no locomotive; “instead, electric motors are attached to wheels all along the train cars, as on some subway trains.”

Why didn’t the Glader/Journal piece mention this little ditty? I don’t know. I suppose it wasn’t deemed important.

As the Kramer/NYT story finds its way back to Russia, we learn that geopolitical friction stretched the Siemens sales pitch over a decade, and it wasn’t until “a general thaw in relations between Germany and Russia” took place that the deal was inked.

The imagery of the actual train trip is woven throughout the Kramer/NYT article with one of my favorites explaining that the Russian tracks still need to be upgraded for high-speed trains:

It was like driving a new Porsche over a rutted road.

I think it’s revealing that while both reporters close with an anecdote, Kramer draws from the actual trip: