by Jacqueline Koch | Aug 8, 2016 |
By Janinne Brunyee
The statistics for mobile phone adoption are by now widely known and understood: 2.6 billion smartphone subscriptions globally and growing to 6.1 billion in 2020. It is also common knowledge that more and more people are accessing magazines and news sites on their mobile devices rather than their laptop or desktop computer.
As publishers try to understand how to create content for this new multi-platform world, many have adopted a “mobile first’ approach to accommodate their growing mobile audience. Unfortunately, for many, “mobile first” really means “mobile only” — optimising for mobile devices like smartphones at the expense of delivering rich, interactive storytelling that is best suited for larger devices.
What is interactive storytelling?
Non-linear, interactive, transmedia, deep-media are all synonyms for interactive storytelling. What these terms all have in common according to Benjamin Hoguet writing on Medium is “our search for interaction whether we ask our audience to click / touch / scroll, to contribute to a participative project or to follow a story spread across several platforms.” Interactive stories have the potential to engage audiences in new and exciting ways. They use a combination of text, code, graphics, audio, photos, videos or animation to create a rich and immersive experience for the reader.
Creating interactive content, requires what Chris Crawford calls “second-person thinking”, the ability of an author to anticipate the audience’s motivations and reactions when put in front of a choice. It requires that the author enters a multidimensional writing space.
Is interactive storytelling ready for the mobile age?
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A case in point is The New York Times’ Interactive page, that features content that can best be described as illustrated blog posts. Interactivity at the NYT in 2016 largely means illustrated timelines, annotated maps and colour photographs that are inserted in the vertical flow of the mobile optimised article. A recent NYT Interactive piece, for example, explores the connection between the Paris bombers using a hierarchical graphic followed by text, images and maps. There is no interactive content where the user gets to access deeper layers of content.
This is a far cry from the rich interactivity of the now famous 2012 Snow Fall series which documented the events that led a group of highly experienced skiers to be in the path of a deadly avalanche in Washington state’s Cascade Mountains. The piece included a variety of opportunities for the reader to explore more content in the form of embedded video, photo galleries of the skiers, animations that illustrated how the snow built up over time, an annotated topographic video that showed the route that the group had taken and more.
While the impetus to simpler, less interactive content for all devices is powerful, it is important not to overlook the fact that desktop/laptop audience for magazine media grew by 6 per cent to 560 million users in the first quarter of 2016 – the first growth in seven months. At the same time, the challenge is for publishers to find ways to create richer, more immersive content for smaller mobile devices.
Great interactive storytelling
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The Cronulla Riots that rocked a suburb of Sydney, Australia a few years ago are explored in depth in a special interactive documentary created by Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), a hybrid-funded Australian public broadcasting radio, online, and television network. The project includes a 60-minute video that is the springboard to explore a wall of content that adds further depth and perspective to the themes that fueled the infamous riots.
The audience is able to learn more about riot themes and explore riot events on an interactive map. When the user clicks on one of the themes, a new translucent layer is presented that offers opportunities to watch videos, see first person testimonials and media headlines and much more. The viewer is able to return to the documentary as the primary focus at any time.
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by Jacqueline Koch | Aug 3, 2016 |
By Janinne Brunyee
“The lying started at 7:27 a.m. and did not stop until after dark. Even for Donald Trump, Monday, Aug. 1, was a banner day for bullshit.” So starts a recent article by Olivia Nuzzi, who covers politics for The Daily Beast.
In today’s highly competitive news environment, how is it that The Daily Beast is growing 25 percent each year to reach more than 20 million readers per month? According to editor-in-chief, John Avlon, while there are a number of factors driving this growth, one of the most important is the publication’s unique voice—as is evidenced by the opening line of the Trump story.
A unique voice at the Daily Beast
“We focus on dictators, dissidents and terrorists,” he said. “Our job is to make important stories interesting and entertaining as well as educational. To do this, we have to be willing to call BS.” According to Avlon, the site’s voice is characterized by short sentences, short paragraphs and vigorous English. “We rely heavily on Hemingway as a style guide,” he said.
Launched in 2006, The Daily Beast takes its name from a fictional newspaper in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop. Avlon, best known as a television journalist with a long list of credits including The Daily Show, CNN, MSNBC and Real Time with Bill Maher, took over as editor-in-chief from Tina Brown in 2013. Brown was a former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker.
With a focus on original reporting and breaking news, The Daily Beast has been able to avoid the commodity news carried by many competitors and create differentiated stories. “Competitors have content farms that create partisan news,” he said. “We carry columns across the opinion spectrum and avoid commodity news from wire services.” With his trademark bluntness, Avlon stated that commodity news kills a news publication because voice is critical.
Hiring writers who are already known on cable news is another important part of The Daily Beast’s strategy. Avlon is himself a regular contributor to CNN. “We get television coverage because our writers are known entities on cable,” he said. At the same time, the publication looks to cable news commentators as a talent pool. Each of The Daily Beast’s writers also pays careful attention to developing their own brands.
According to Avlon, while many partisan news sites are seeing declines, The Daily Beast continues to prosper. “Our competitors have had a rough period but we are growing with a lean team of 100 people,” he said.
“We have built a great team and we are hard to poach from. Our journalists have a sense of mission and that’s why we have a high-morale, high-metabolism newsroom,” he said.
According to Avlon, his team is not solely measured on traffic markers. Instead, the focus is on identifying and creating the stories that readers love.
“We have to be nimble. We are a pirate ship fighting a guerilla war,” he said. “But we understand that quality content creates a quality audience.”
The Daily Beast is not only a breaking news site. There is an increasing focus on the lifestyle sector. According to Avlon, the publication understands that people have a variety of interests. “You can appeal to different sides of their personality to create a site that is less siloed,” he said.
The business of news at The Daily Beast
The Daily Beast’s main revenue stream is content marketing which allows it to bring quality content to its quality audience and help advertisers avoid adblockers. “We have found that quality branded content will do well. It involves a shift in thinking about what advertising is.” According to Avlon, his team takes the business side very seriously. “We all need to think entrepreneurially. If we don’t there are major threats,” he said.
“Our business is a mix between science and jazz. We are reactive to the news cycle but we use data to anticipate what readers are interested in,” he said. The Daily Beast team aims to be transparent about data so that everyone in the newsroom understands what is working and what isn’t. Avlon is quick to point out, however, that his team cannot rely solely on algorithms. “If you use algorithms only, you will lose your differentiation. You will end up with celebrity gossip, sex scandals and will miss out on the real meat,” he said.
Embracing social platforms
The Daily Beast is amongst the many publications including The Washington Post, Slate, and Gawker who are embracing Facebook Instant Articles. “Facebook is a major player in content distribution and can be an enormously powerful way to get some of our branded or sponsored content out,” he said.
The team has also been aggressive with Facebook Live to create intimacy with reporters. Earlier this year, The Daily Beast launched two new original live series on Facebook. “Cheat Sheet” features Avlon and other editors breaking down the top stories of the day and answering questions from the Facebook audience. “Drink Cart” features author and cocktail expert Noah Rothbaum talking with a Daily Beast editor about the latest culture news over drinks.
Keep them hooked right to the end
“With his mouth full of fast-food poultry and his hands gripping a knife and fork, for a blissful few moments, Donald Trump told no lies at all.” So ends Olivia Nuzzi’s article 15 Hours of Donald Trump’s Lies. A great reminder for all storytellers to find their voice, create unique content and stay committed to the last period.
The Daily Beast is one of the companies that participants of the 2016 VDZ Akademie Digital Publisher’s Tour visited in New York City this June. The Tour was co-organized by Boost! Collective.
This is the second in a series of pieces we are writing about the storytellers we met on the tour. Read the first piece Powering passionate storytelling at The Atavist Magazine
Boost! Collective is a strategic messaging and story-driven communications firm. We help clients discover, write and tell powerful stories which drive engagement.
by Jacqueline Koch | Aug 1, 2016 |
By Jacqueline Koch
Artificial intelligence (AI) is expanding into an array of unexpected applications, looming ever larger on the horizon of our tech-powered future. It’s increasingly dominating media headlines as well. Take the recent news of AlphaGo. This is the AI “mind” that defeated one of the best players of Go, considered perhaps one of the most complex games developed by humans.
In China, more than 280 million people watched the game live, marvelling at a machine’s strategic mastery over man. However, not all AI developments are winners. On the flip side of AlphaGo’s triumph, was Tay, the chatbot released by Microsoft that was trained to respond like a millennial. In short time, its vulnerabilities were exposed and Tay, mimicking users, transformed into a racist, xenophobic, misogynistic chatterbox.
Whoops.
Nonetheless, AI is rapidly on the rise with mind-boggling potential, from fighting cancer and creating original art to seeing for the blind. And AI is advancing in tandem with a precipitous shift on the web, which is moving more and more from text to images.
Each day, two billion photos are shared online, keeping pace with the surge toward visually driven apps such as Snapchat and Instagram. Bringing AI together with a glut of photos has driven image recognition technology into high gear, yielding great gains for retailers, advertisers and consumers, but most importantly, publishers.
The ABCs of AI
Images. Images. Images. They are the foundational building blocks buttressing AI development of ever more powerful image recognition technology, and it’s near relative, face recognition technology. A recent issue of Wired offered the 30,000-foot view by taking a deep dive into machine learning, the foundation of AI. This approach, which relies on “training” a computer rather than coding, is now far more powerful thanks to “deep neural networks.”
These are massively distributed computational systems that mimic the multilayered connections of neurons in the brain. As a simple example, to train a computer to recognise a photo of an elephant, developers “show” it thousands of photos, including many with elephants. The more images, the better the computer learns. Take this process to its next logical steps, and billions of images down the road, behold the birth of image recognition technology.
Image recognition technology has moved rapidly ahead. Today, it can correctly analyse objects, faces, places, colours, logos and more. This also means that any company with access to large collections of photos wields a new knowledge gathering superpower: data mining. It’s a competitive edge, leapfrogging previous information gathering and marketing research tactics, and with the capacity to drill down to a granular level of user insights, image recognition technology is predicted to be a $30 billion market by 2020.
AI-empowered fashionistas
In the retail space, Macy’s set the pace in 2014 with the launch of an iOS app allowing shoppers to upload a photo, find an equivalent product on Macys.com and purchase it immediately. The result: instant gratification for shoppers and a doubling of mobile sales in fiscal 2015 for Macy’s.
Google, not surprisingly, moved in quickly with the Google Photos app, which hit 100 million users in its first five months. It allows users to store, organise, catalogue and search their images. However, just as there’s no such thing as a free lunch, there is a lucrative strategy behind Google’s free cloud-based app. Google has effectively deployed armies of users, who are rebelling and reorganising their images, to provide a vast dataset. This allows Google to hone and re-hone algorithms and thereby dramatically improve visual searches and expand services.
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