I'm fascinated by the intersection of tech and story. I've been exploring how technology influences the way we tell "Story" for over 20 years. The printing press influenced storytelling, early photography (called "the mirror with a memory" when it first appeared) changed it, film, TV, CD ROMs, web, smartphones are all influencers on storytelling.
The challenge is to see the new tech not as a way to port existing techniques to the new, like laying a legacy newspaper format online, but to explore what is intrinsic to the new tech. How can a short video enhance a text-based story? How do links enrich an article. How about interactivity: articles no longer need be linear but can move between media, timelines, even other articles.
One of the first tools we are introducing on CrowdNews to help journalists explore the ways technology can influence “Story” is our “Newstream®.” Newstreams give our member journalists the freedom to define the life of a story. A Newstream consists of components of information and content that comprise a story, presented over time. We call each component of a Newstream a “Dispatch". A Dispatch can be a text article, a video clip, a map, an audio file, other media, or a combination of all of them. (More about
Newstreams)
So here’s an exercise: imagine a story you want to write. Now imagine what might be missing using only the written word, say a story that references a particular sound. Maybe it’s about a musical instrument, or an elephant’s cry, or the different sounds car designers are anticipating putting on the new silent electric cars. Adding an audio file to a written text lets your audience experience that story in a much richer way.
Digital media allows us to hear a part of a story that should be heard rather than read about.
What I’m really excited about is exploring how a journalist could use virtual reality to tell a story. With VR, a journalist could physically guide me around the grassy knoll where Kennedy was shot, take me on an exploration of an Ebola clinic, explain monetary policy, put me on the field of an NFL game.
But that’s a ways off yet. While William Gibson's books aren’t specifically about journalism and storytelling (even though he tells great stories), his works have been a big influence on my vision of technology-influenced storytelling and journalism. In Spook Country Gibson introduced me to locative art.
The first strand of the novel follows Hollis Henry...a freelance journalist. She is hired by advertising mogul Hubertus Bigend to write a story for his nascent magazine Node (described as a European Wired) about the use of locative technology in the art world.
Wikipedia talks about Location-based media:
Location-based media (LBM) delivers multimedia and other content directly to the user of a mobile device dependent upon their location. Location information determined by means such as mobile phone tracking and other emerging Real-time locating system technologies like Wi-Fi or RFID can be used to customize media content presented on the device. –
Wikipedia Locative Media
WOW! Imagine LBM in a journalist's toolbox!
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