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.
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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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Six Competencies of the Next Generation News Organization
The Media Management Center at Northwestern University recently came out with a report called “Six Competencies of the Next Generation News Organizations“.
The introduction scopes the report’s objective:
Advances in technology continue to spur great innovation in media — especially in the news industry. At the same time, these rapid-fire innovations have upended the ways in which news is gathered and distributed and threaten the financial core of the news business. This study seeks to identify technology trends that will have an important impact on the future of news reporting and delivery in the near term. Like a scout surveying the frontier ahead, this report also explores technologies to come and recommends ways news organizations can prepare themselves for ongoing and impending change.
While I can’t say the 92-page tomb is an easy read the recommendations around six capabilities that news organizations must build or strengthen to compete in the changing media landscape did catch my attention.
Lo and behold one of the six capabilities captured is “The Complete Storyteller.”
I think we can all agree that the ”Incomplete Storyteller” is not the way to go.
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Warren Buffett Tells a Good Story
It’s not enough that Warren Buffett has generated a net worth of around $62 billion, making him one of the richest men in the world.
He’s also a world-class storyteller. (If it makes you feel any better, at least he’s not handsome.)
With Warren Buffett in the spotlight for rescuing Goldman Sachs with a $5 billion infusion, lending his wisdom on the economic turmoil, and talk of landing the Secretary of the Treasury gig, I thought the timing was right to revisit his other gift.
No question, Warren - I’m adopting his propensity for down-home casual - knows how to turn a phrase. Referring to derivatives as “financial weapons of mass destruction” serves as exhibit A.
But to say that Warren has honed the art of a sound bite sells him short.
This is a guy who knows how to tell a story and effectively apply the technique to the business world as illustrated in his annual letter to shareholders. Yes, the letters contain the facts and figures behind Berkshire Hathaway’s financial performance, but they also bring an element of levity to the equation.
One of my favorite passages appeared in his 2006 shareholders letter:
To add to the Sunday fun Ariel Hsing will play table tennis (ping pong to the uninitiated) from 1 pm to 4 pm against anyone brave enough to take her on. Ariel, though only 11, is ranked number one among girls under 16 in the U.S. I played Ariel, then 9, thinking I would take it easy on her so as not to crush her young spirit. Instead she crushed me …
Self deprecation plays in Peoria.
Let me end this section by telling you about one of the good guys of Wall Street, my long-time friend Walter Schloss, who last year turned 90. From 1956 to 2002, Walter managed a remarkably successful investment partnership, from which he took not a dime unless his investors made money. My admiration for Walter, it should be noted, is not based on hindsight. A full fifty years ago, Walter was my sole recommendation to a St. Louis family who wanted an honest and able investment manager.
Walter did not go to business school, or for that matter, college. His office contained one file cabinet in 1956; the number mushroomed to four by 2002. Walter worked without a secretary, clerk or bookkeeper, his only associate being his son, Edwin, a graduate of the North Carolina School of the Arts. Walter and Edwin never came within a mile of inside information. Indeed, they used “outside” information only sparingly, generally selecting securities by certain simple statistical methods Walter learned while working for Ben Graham. When Walter and Edwin were asked in 1989 by Outstanding Investors Digest, “How would you summarize your approach?” Edwin replied, “We try to buy stocks cheap.” So much for Modern Portfolio Theory, technical analysis, macroeconomic thoughts and complex algorithms.
Following a strategy that involved no real risk – defined as permanent loss of capital – Walter produced results over his 47 partnership years that dramatically surpassed those of the S&P 500. It’s particularly noteworthy that he built this record by investing in about 1,000 securities, mostly of a lackluster type. A few big winners did not account for his success. It’s safe to say that had millions of investment managers made trades by a) drawing stock names from a hat; b) purchasing these stocks in comparable amounts when Walter made a purchase; and then c) selling when Walter sold his pick, the luckiest of them would not have come close to equaling his record. There is simply no possibility that what Walter achieved over 47 years was due to chance.
I first publicly discussed Walter’s remarkable record in 1984. At that time “efficient market theory” (EMT) was the centerpiece of investment instruction at most major business schools. This theory, as then most commonly taught, held that the price of any stock at any moment is not demonstrably mispriced, which means that no investor can be expected to overperform the stock market averages using only publicly-available information (though some will do so by luck). When I talked about Walter 23 years ago, his record forcefully contradicted this dogma.
And what did members of the academic community do when they were exposed to this new and important evidence? Unfortunately, they reacted in all-too-human fashion: Rather than opening their minds, they closed their eyes. To my knowledge no business school teaching EMT made any attempt to study Walter’s performance and what it meant for the school’s cherished theory.
Instead, the faculties of the schools went merrily on their way presenting EMT as having the certainty of scripture. Typically, a finance instructor who had the nerve to question EMT had about as much chance of major promotion as Galileo had of being named Pope.
Tens of thousands of students were therefore sent out into life believing that on every day the price of every stock was “right” (or, more accurately, not demonstrably wrong) and that attempts to evaluate businesses – that is, stocks – were useless. Walter meanwhile went on overperforming, his job made easier by the misguided instructions that had been given to those young minds. After all, if you are in the shipping business, it’s helpful to have all of your potential competitors be taught that the earth is flat.
Maybe it was a good thing for his investors that Walter didn’t go to college.
Classic storytelling.
He builds both context and empathy for the main character. The drama comes in academia refusing to consider that there might be “life” beyond efficient market theory (EMT). Humor is woven throughout the story. And you don’t need to be a numbers jockey to appreciate the benefits of an open mind.
The same mentality comes out when Warren verbally articulated his views in a recent interview on the “Charlie Rose” show. (Thanks to my college fraternity buddy Jim Engle for passing that along.)
He’s definitely figured out a conversational tone trumps striving for the smartest-kid-in-the-class crown.
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