We’re seeing it at my university.  And I’ll bet other universities are cutting loose of big-budget printed items as well.  But let’s say you cancel the printing of a magazine.  Does that mean the magazine must die?  The way I see it, the writers and communicators under the university advancement umbrella aren’t in the business of printing things.  They are in the business of telling stories.  The shift to focus energies ONLINE is the obvious no-brainer, although to some the concept is difficult to grasp.

This snippit from Jason Santa Maria’s post has many applications to higher ed:

Without the print edition to serve as the flagship product, the website will no longer be a second class citizen or a quaint add-on to a business model; it will become the business model. Companies will need to rethink their strategies and goals for the web, and ways to distinguish themselves. If a publication or a few happen to break out of the current mold and start innovating, this may cause other publications, whether still maintaining print editions or not, to become competitive online as well. Once a publication forms a real connection with readers by giving them a reason to care about their website, other publications will be forced to do the same.

The medium of print will not die, but its spot atop the mountain of mainstream content distribution is in its final days. This could bring about a rebirth of design innovation online. We can help bring about change and find new ways to connect with audiences. This is an exciting time to be a designer, assuming we can all hang onto our jobs long enough to see what happens.

Continuing on the topic of my last post,  I’d like to try and frame the question more precisely.  It goes like this:

Do you think that longer feature stories should be created solely for a web audience?  I’m not talking about putting up an online version of a story initially meant for a printed magazine.  I’m talking about straight to web.

I’d like your opinions.

The reason I’m asking, …I went around searching for other universities who go beyond the short and simple press-release mentality on the web.  I went looking for great feature writing.  And I found a few nice examples.  A great majority though, were simply online versions of printed university magazine articles.  The kind that stuck out to me were the feature stories born and bred for the web:

The University of Texas does a great job of highlighting feature stories on their homepage.
Check out the archive of all the 2008 features:
http://www.utexas.edu/features/2008/

Another great example is Mizzou Wire, from the University of Missouri.

“A lot happens here at Mizzou. Researchers and teachers virtually live in labs and classrooms and tackle topics ranging from disease to politics. Students learn, compete, volunteer, cheer and much more. Big events and big-time performers come and go. Athletes win and lose. There are plenty of stories to go around.

We’ll be telling some of those stories at Mizzou Wire, the University’s new news and features Web site. We’ll include news briefs and deeper features. We’ll tell stories in words, photos, audio and video. We’ll also share stories from the many great outlets around campus and beyond.”

I’m looking for more academic/institutional examples.  Know of any?

Related:

Great tips for web writing at A List Apart

A few days ago, a colleague said to matter-of-factly to me: “people generally won’t read magazine articles online”.  I kind’ve paused and simmered on the idea.  It didn’t match my own personal experience.

That pointed statement has remained on my mind.  I thought of it again recently when reading a Q&A with web designer Jeffrey Zeldman.  When asked which “initiatives that are on the horizon do you think will benefit the Web’s future the most?” He replied:

I don’t think any technology out there holds to the key to a better web experience for all. As far as I can tell, the web’s future will be driven by the same thing that drove its past: good ideas, good writing, good design.

So, what kind of good writing are we talking about?  And what about this “rule” that says people won’t read lengthy articles online?  Even GREAT well written articles?

I’m aware that some web (and print) audiences consume information (graze) at a different tempo. The attention spans of goldfish crowd. And we’re all guilty of reading/skimming in that mode on occasion.  And I’m aware that long sections of copy should be broken up somewhat and presented differently on-screen.  These realities should effect how we develop and present content on the web.

But back to my core conflict.

To conclude that online readers as a group don’t read the longer articles that they would in print -  to insinuate that web audiences belong somehow to a lower class of readership, …I don’t buy it.  I find it insulting.

Anyway, I’ve done a little searching in attempts to find similar conversations on this topic.

At Gangrey.com there is a short post on this very subject, followed by a lengthy and entertaining comment trail from newspaper-types and journalists:

…We’re having discussions about what are the best ways to do storytelling online. Some have argued that there’s no place for “narrative” storytelling online, that people won’t take the time to sit down and read true “stories” online, that storytelling must take a different (and presumably less time-intensive) form.

The comments/replies to this post are great.  A sampling:

All the research I’ve seen shows that people are more likely to read long stories online than in a newspaper. Let me put it another way. When do you have more time? In the morning drinking coffee or all day stuck in front of a computer screen?

people think in stories, this happened, then that happened, then the next thing happened, beginning to middle to end. We want a political candidate to come in story form. Juries go with the most believable, most compelling story. In sports, every game is a story, every season is a story, every franchise is a story. It’s been this way FOREVER, and I just can’t believe — will not believe — that’s changed in the last, oh, 10, 12 years since the Web came along.

I regularly have lots of ideas on how to tell stories using the Web, and I usually can get the Web folks stuff that’s half there (such as handing them an edited video, a markup of a Web page, etc.). But unless I know how to actually program it on the page, a lot of times it just doesn’t happen. That’s been the case at every paper and magazine I’ve worked at. I’ve started studying how to use Flash, but, honestly, the right-brained computer programming and left-brained writing is a lot of brain to be using. And because I prefer writing, sometimes I just throw my hands up, post an audio slide show and move on to the next story.

you see so many other papers where the top story on the web site is “what’s the most salacious bit of cop news from this morning” or “what photo gallery is going to get the most hits” — obviously, the lowest common denominator in web “journalism.”

What I’m hoping to do is try to get a narrative foothold in our paper’s digital world. And when you go up to a web editor to discuss this, and the first thing he says is, “Well, we first need to realize that people don’t read long stories online,” you can see the culture we’re battling here.

Last week I reluctantly completed a multimedia web feature.  This was one of those rare all-consuming projects that I was resigned to keep noodling with until it was perfected and/or ruined.

Check it out.

It all started when a coworker nonchalantly gave me a cd, saying “Here are some photos from a student trip to the middle east.  You might want to do some kind of multimedia thing with them.” So I pop in the cd, expecting to see the standard fare of student travel photography that we’re all so familiar with in these kind of Higher Ed stories: Poorly composed group shots of said-student-group in front of tourist trap A, tourist trap B, tourist trap C, intermingled with party pics that should have been filtered out before handing over to any kind of university staff or administration.

This wasn’t that kind of cd.  These weren’t those kind of photos.

The first file opened up and caught me off guard.  I literally had to catch my breath.

They were captured by an anthropology student who’d received financial support to accompany her professor on an archaeology research project in Yemen.

I have to admit, I knew NOTHING about Yemen.  In spite of being a news junkie and eating PBS specials and documentaries like candy; in spite of being a fairly informed individual, you know, geopolitically and stuff, Yemen for me was a blank.  The only thing I knew about Yemen was that the USS Cole was bombed in a Yemen port during the Clinton administration.

Strictly in terms of subject matter, any grouping of photos from Yemen would have interested me.  But I was caught off guard by the composition, the humanity, and the general awesomeness of this photography. Pouring over the contents of the student cd was probably as close as I’ll ever get to being a photo editor at National Geographic.

Needless to say, it was obvious that something special had found my desk, and I made a quiet commitment to do this story justice, and share it with our university community.  Only recently I’d posted something here about wanting to take a bigger step into multimedia storytelling, and I knew instantly that this project would give me an opportunity to take a giant leap in that direction.

Materials Gathering

Tossing the photos into a simple slideshow would have been an injustice. I scheduled studio time with the local public radio station (housed at our university) and invited Elizabeth to come and talk about Yemen, about her experience, and about her photography.  I was afraid that she might be overly nervous.  I was afraid that she might not be able to recount her experiences well enough.  But she proved otherwise.

We sat down in the recording studio and I setup a laptop.  We used it to page through her photographs as we talked.  Each image had a story behind it.  Some images, multiple stories.   We recorded about 40 minutes of audio.

After we were done, she handed over another cd filled with little videos she’d recorder with her Flip. Then another cd with popular/traditional Yemen music. At that moment, I knew I was in way over my head.  Not only was I sitting on top of 40 minutes worth of interview recordings, but now a pile of video clips and music.

At any point in a project like this, you expect to hit a snag.  Your subject isn’t well-spoken; your media assets are lacking; your equipment faults;  …but none of that happened.  There would be no excuses.  Only increased pressure to produce.

The Edit

As a general rule, you never have time to work on really cool, intensive projects.  You just kind of make them happen, somehow. To weave the photos, audio, and video clips into something that made sense, took the better part of October and November, working about an hour each day.

I’m not a video producer, editor, or any kind of audio technician.  I’m a pixel-pushing web designer.  So maybe the post production took so long because I didn’t have a defined process or workflow.  I tried to work out a loose storyboard on paper, which helped, but the finished product didn’t resemble it in the least.

I started out by making an inventory, labeling all the assets.  For the audio, I’m an Audacity guy.  In all, there were three BIG audio files, and I brought them all into one audacity project and for the first time used the labels function to make notes on top of the timeline.

Putting it all together

So I exported specific audio clips and imported them into iMovie, along with all the photos and video clips. Then whatever “process” I tried to inject went out the window.  I tried to string together some kind of narrative and match the audio descriptions with specfic imagery.

This is where, I think, good editors and storytellers shine and/or fade.  Many roadblocks.  Many afternoons I’d hit a snag and get lost, give up, and go home.  I had no idea this stuff could be so complicated.  In the end I was able to make progress only when I quit trying to be strategic and just went with what felt right.

Then one day it was done.  13 full minutes.  It was less of a multimedia feature and more of a mini-documentary.  Actually I think it needs to be trimmed by a third.  It’s funny how you can chop stuff off and make a project more compelling.

With a complete video, I started thinking of ways to package it.  Throwing it on youtube seemed obvious, but I decided to take it beyond that and design/develop a page for it to live on, in the spirit on the online magazine’ish features that I’m fond of at espn. This way, I could also throw in a few audio clips that didn’t make it into the video.  I’m also planning on getting an interview with Elizabeth’s professor who was also on the trip.  Throw in some website fixes,  …IE 6 alignment issues and cleaning up my inline CSS.  …Then it’ll be done.

I think.

View the almost-completed feature.

Now I have a personal goal.  I want to always have a project like this in the works.  I need to work on ways of going out and finding stories that have potential.  Sometimes they fall in your lap.  But not very often.

See Also:

A set of videos by Ira Glass of This American Life, is a great place to begin for me.  I don’t think it really matters if you’re talking about audio, video, photography, or written word.  Storytelling is an artist’s craft.  If you’re starting from the ground-floor with no experience like me, those videos are very educational.

Something I came across today, and thought it was worth sharing:

Always remember: Using campaigns and slogans as a substitute for genuine communication with your marketplace is like eating a candy bar to relieve fatigue. It can work, but only temporarily. The fatigue will return; and when it does, it will return ferociously. The messages of imagebuilding campaigns, like the sugar in candy bars, can never replace real substance.

I found that article while googling for argument ammunition on Karlin’s post about the difference between Communications and Marketing.

the other found nugget:

Communication is the process of creating a shared understanding between the sender and the receiver of any given message. Persuasion, on the other hand, only attempts to get the person receiving the message to respond as the sender desires that person to respond. Persuasion does not necessitate a shared understanding. Sales pitches do not sustain a dialogue with the customer.