MediaShift

5 Tips for Transmedia Storytelling

mlooney@icfj.org — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 03:00:00 -0800

With readers juggling their tablets, mobile phones, laptops and more as they consume the news, journalists have an opportunity to create a new kind of story. Transmedia storytelling means dividing chunks of a story across multiple platforms to form one cohesive narrative. Transmedia stories often have audience engagement as a key goal. Creating an online component to a documentary film, hosting a live event to complement a recent profile on a needy cause, or pairing an interactive website with your book release are all ways to build audience engagement across platforms. The term "transmedia" has met its share of controversy, as it's often used to describe the techniques marketing and entertainment industries use to promote new films and TV series (and rake in money). But whatever you call this form of storytelling, it lets you take advantage of multiple media in unique ways. If you give it a try, keep these tips in mind: 1. Keep content unique Rather than repeating the information on different platforms, use different parts of a story to match a platform's strength and maximize user experience. A project called "Culture of Coffee," for instance, matches unique story bits with different forms of media. Project creator Metasebia Yoseph traces the roots and traditions of coffee on a Tumblr blog, a website, a coffee table book (in the works), live events, social media and crowdfunding. 2. Provide a seamless point of entry Because audience engagement is central...

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Lessons Learned From A Collaboration Without Borders in Latin America

econstantaras@internews.org — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 05:00:00 -0800

The premise of the collaboration was simple: if organized crime can establish and manage a transnational, multibillion dollar business from Colombia to Mexico, surely Latin American journalists can band together to track them. A collective investigation into organized crime by independent online investigative outlets could reveal how organized crime networks operate and perpetuate human rights abuses, lessen the danger to any one participating media taking on organized criminals alone and increase audience and revenue. The project could transform the way emerging online investigative outlets inform the regional debate. From this concept, Colaboración sin Fronteras emerged. Verdad Abierta (Open Truth) in Colombia; El Faro (The Lighthouse) in El Salvador; Plaza Pública (Public Forum) in Guatemala; and Animal Político (Political Animal) in Mexico joined together to produce ground-breaking, online, investigative journalism projects related to organized crime in their region. As part of the collaboration, reporters from these outlets traveled into deserted Mexican villages to document overnight flights of hundreds of families, into abandoned and graffitied houses in San Salvador to determine which gang currently reigns supreme, and into haunting massacre sites in Petén, Guatemala to uncover how agro-industrials collude with local and international armed actors to gain territory. Their final product, The Mafia's Shadow in the Americas was funded by Internews' Global...

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Can Local Newspapers Collaborate with Blogs? J-Lab Finds Answers

ahirschdc@gmail.com — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 05:00:00 -0800

J-Lab recently released the results of its Networked Journalism pilot project, a three-year initiative that "called for eight newspapers and one public radio station to network with local blogs," resulting in "nine different models of collaboration," J-Lab reports. In a detailed report called Networked Journalism: What Works, J-Lab's executive director, Jan Schaffer, outlines the problem the project was designed to explore: With U.S. newspapers losing more than 42,000 journalists since 2007, local news coverage has suffered. At the same time, hundreds of local blogs and news sites have launched in their markets ... What role can traditional news organizations play not only to expose their audiences to more news than they themselves can deliver, but also to connect new sources of information rising throughout their communities? She concludes that for a partnership between a legacy newsroom and its community partners to succeed, two things are needed: First, "it is the responsibility of the hub news organization to provide their news networks with enough visibility and outbound links to drive traffic to their partners' sites." And second, "it is the responsibility of the community news partners to post frequently enough to be robust participants and to nab the visibility -- either on the network page or the home page -- that would bring them traffic." Of the nine pilots, Schaffer counts five as clear successes. Q&A I recently interviewed Schaffer about the...

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Two-Thirds of Frontline Programming is From Collaboration

ahirschdc@gmail.com — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 05:00:00 -0800

Approximately two-thirds of Frontline's programming is produced through some form of editorial collaboration, said Raney Aronson-Rath, the series' deputy executive producer, when we spoke last week by phone. Recent examples include Concussion Watch, a joint investigation with ESPN into brain injuries among NFL players, and Big Sky, Big Money, a look at the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision produced in partnership with public radio's Marketplace. In recent years, some of the series' more high-profile investigations have also been produced as collaborations, including Post Mortem (with NPR, ProPublica, the Investigative Reporting Program at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, and California Watch) and Law & Disorder (with ProPublica and the New Orleans Times-Picayune). By "editorial collaboration," Aronson-Rath means reporters and editors at partner organizations working together -- "being colleagues to each other." She differentiates this form of collaboration from what she calls "institutional partnerships." "Our relationships are truly editorial first, then the institutional relationship comes," she said, noting that series executive producer David Fanning has championed collaboration for years. In the case of Concussion Watch, for example, the collaboration came about because journalists at Frontline and ESPN shared an interest in the story, and Frontline recognized that ESPN reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru were "the leading...

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How Tod Machover and the City of Toronto Are Creating a Symphony

ahirschdc@gmail.com — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 09:20:48 -0800

"Over the coming months, I am inviting you -- the citizens of Toronto -- to collaborate with me to compose a new symphony which will be premiered by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra ... Some of the music will be by you, some by me, and some shaped by us together. My hope is that we will create something that neither you nor I could have done without each other, and that will be surprising, stimulating, and beautiful, a musical portrait about -- and by -- Toronto." -- Tod Machover Tod Machover knows how to collaborate. A composer, inventor and educator at the MIT Media Lab who was nominated for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Music, his innovative approach to collaboration with A Toronto Symphony offers lessons in artistic collaboration as well as lessons for collaborators in all sectors -- journalism included. We recently spoke by phone. Collaborating with a City In addition to composing his own music, Machover is passionate about making music central to people's lives -- and many of the technologies he's created do just that, from the technology behind Guitar Hero to Hyperscore, which lets anyone compose music using visual tools. When the Toronto Symphony asked him to curate an upcoming festival for them, and to explore the theme of the future of orchestras, Machover saw an opportunity to bring his passions together. "Is there a way to make the kind of music I really want to make," he asked himself, "and open up to the...

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Our Guide to Getting Along With Your Family This Thanksgiving

ahirschdc@gmail.com — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 05:00:00 -0800

This Thanksgiving, while others are stuffing turkeys and dotting casserole dishes of sweet potatoes with mini-marshmallows, we at Collaboration Central are serving up something completely different: a survival strategy. Let's face it: Many people dread this holiday, with its requisite bringing together of family members who vastly prefer being apart. In this way, Thanksgiving is like so many journalistic collaborations: a forced communion of grudging participants, full of heightened expectations, anxiety and people longing for a drink. Well, gentle reader -- never fear. We've been documenting best practices in collaboration for over a year, and now, we put them to work for Thanksgiving gatherings across the land: 1. Plan Early and Often "If I've learned anything about managing collaborative investigative journalism, it's that planning matters." - Carrie Lozano (see full article) Here, Lozano says "investigative journalism," but she might as well have said, "Thanksgiving dinner." My own mother uses an Excel spreadsheet to plan her Thanksgiving menu (this is not a joke), detailing everything from her grocery list to game-day scheduling concerns. That my mother does this explains many things about me. But I digress. If your Thanksgiving dinner is a potluck affair, then you'll do yourself a favor to make contributors' roles and responsibilities crystal clear. When you ask Aunt Minnie to bring cranberry sauce, be specific: Should she bring a serving dish as well, or...

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15 Must-Have Collaboration Tools for Journalists

jxie54@gmail.com — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 05:00:00 -0800

While collaboration can't run on technology alone (our roundup of collaboration best practices makes the need for human planning and participation clear), tech tools definitely make working together easier today than it's ever been before. The following websites, apps and software help journalists work together on multimedia storytelling, data visualization, and more. Please comment to share additional collaboration tools you recommend. STORYTELLING ScribbleLive ScribbleLive is a comprehensive content-management system optimized for covering news and events in real time. Collaborative live-blogging on ScribbleLive incorporates photos, videos, social media, SMS and voicemail. ScribbleLive Demo from Arian Schuessler on Vimeo. SoundCloud SoundCloud hosts original audio clips in a visual, shareable player, where collaborators can input timed comments for pinpointed feedback. Storify Storify makes it easy to synthesize content from social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Youtube into coherent stories. Stroome Stroome is a collaborative online video-editing community where journalists can find clips from the web's largest rights-cleared clip pool and work with friends and colleagues to edit content in real time. SOCIAL MEDIA Buffer Buffer lets team members schedule social media updates on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and App.net accounts. HootSuite HootSuite powers social-media content management for various platforms including...

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Don't Just Get Along; Have the Tough Conversations to Make Collaborations Work

alison@whatisaggregate.com — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 05:00:00 -0800

After 16 years of working for and with non-profit organizations and philanthropic foundations, I've concluded that social and policy change doesn't happen without collaboration. Whether it's a coalition of like-minded organizations, a network of activists organizing in response to an injustice or a meeting between adversaries looking for common ground, collaboration allows us to have a greater impact than going it alone. But I've also learned that collaboration is hard work and that most collaborations that fail do so because the hardest work of all -- being honest about who we are and what we want -- is not done. Don't Ignore Differences At the beginning of my career, I worked on a national diversity education initiative that partnered with colleges and universities to offer a course that utilized video production as an experiential educational tool. At the start of the course, taught by an interdisciplinary team of professors, students worked independently to produce "video diaries" that examined an aspect of their identity (e.g., race, gender, sexuality, culture, class.) Later in the course, the students were assembled into teams to produce a group video project of their collective choosing. For anyone who has ever done any video or film production work, you know the number of decisions that must be made -- concept, script, shot angles, music, editing -- and how each can dramatically change the meaning of the ultimate product. For a team of diverse individuals who...

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A Case Study in Quick Collaboration -- Hold the Bureaucracy

ihill@kqed.org — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 10:00:00 -0800

It's understandable if you feel overwhelmed and intimidated by collaboration. After all, the examples of it that often get hyped in articles like this one are big, ongoing projects that have their own funding, business models, staff and offices. They are partnerships between huge organizations that involve lawyers and contracts. Such large-scale projects have their place, but the amount of time and resources they require can scare some people away from attempting to collaborate. This article is not about that type of collaboration. This is about a collaborative project that started with relationships built at conferences and on social media, required only two phone calls, and lasted about six weeks. It shows that bureaucracy isn't necessarily needed for multiple organizations to work together and have an impact. Getting a Bigger Audience for Youth Voices This fall, staff at public media organizations in California, Oregon and Washington state interviewed dozens of young Americans for "From the West Coast: Voices of Young Voters." The goal was to offer a better understanding of how Millennials felt about politics, the election, and the future of the country. You can find the project at SoundCloud.com/youngvoterswest and at the four participating stations: KQED in San Francisco, KPCC in Los Angeles, Oregon Public Broadcasting in Portland and KPLU in Tacoma, Wash. I also wrote about the project in a blog post on NPR's website, and some of the audio is being...

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An Inside Look at WisconsinVote.org, a Public Media Collaboration

ahirschdc@gmail.com — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 05:00:00 -0800

"WisconsinVote.org is a great example of a collaboration between a public television and radio station to create a service for the community," said Ann Alquist, director of Radio Engagement at the National Center for Media Engagement (NCME), via email. The site, which offers comprehensive election coverage and resources for Wisconsin voters, is a joint project of Wisconsin Public Television (WPT) and Wisconsin Public Radio (WPR). As Alquist sees it, WisconsinVote.org "combines all of the assets of public media: our journalistic credibility, the power of the combined TV and radio megaphones, and relevant content for citizens ... Public media audiences expect public television and public radio to work together to create a great, civic service. WisconsinVote.org meets those expectations." With that kind of ringing endorsement, I was curious to learn more about the nature of the WPT/WPR collaboration. I interviewed Andy Soth, senior producer at WPT, and Adam Hirsch (no relation to me), producer, WisconsinVote.org, via email; an edited transcript follows. Q&A Collaboration Central: What are you most proud of about WisconsinVote.org that you couldn't have accomplished without collaboration? Soth: I'm very pleased that since our relaunch, visitors to our site are much more likely to engage with our radio and television content. We have always used WisconsinVote.org as a source for our election coverage, but other features of the site, like candidate profiles and voter...

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Knight Foundation's John Bracken: Funders Shouldn't Force Collaboration

ahirschdc@gmail.com — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 09:30:00 -0800

John Bracken, director of Journalism and Media Innovation at the Knight Foundation, wants to know what I mean by "collaboration." We're chatting by phone about how collaboration fits into Bracken's vision for news innovation. I throw out a modest definition. "Working together," I say. "Playing nice." (It's not a sophisticated characterization, to be sure, but it'll do.) He's right to make sure we're working with a common understanding of the term, since, as he observes, "Collaboration means different things to different people." (Carrie Lozano wrote about that very issue here on MediaShift earlier this year.) Bracken notes, for example, that for some news orgs, linking to each other constitutes collaboration; for others, collaboration means a complete merging of operations. Bracken is wary of what he calls "collaboration with a capital C." "A funder can come up with an idea and get two organizations at a table and force a relationship, or strongly encourage a coordination of activities," he says -- this is capital C collaboration, in his book -- but "my hunch is that's going to be less effective and less fun for all involved than if two people who are doing the work have a cup of coffee," or develop an idea together over Twitter or IM. Those people, by the way, tend to be "in the middle" of an organization, in his experience -- not at the executive level (or at the most junior level). "The ethos that comes from the open web is about collaboration," Bracken notes,...

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St. Louis Non-Profit News Orgs Partner on Beyond November and More

ahirschdc@gmail.com — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 06:00:00 -0800

Correction: The Twitter hashtag for Beyond November is #beyondnov, not #beyondnovember as a previous version of this post stated. In St. Louis, three non-profit news organizations -- St. Louis Public Radio (SLPR), the Nine Network of Public Media and the St. Louis Beacon -- have joined forces to produce election coverage through a project called Beyond November. Their hope, as the name implies, is to keep the project going after the election is over, at which point coverage would focus on holding elected officials accountable; the partners are currently fundraising toward that goal. (Beyond November is currently funded by a $200,000 grant from the Deer Creek Foundation.) In the meantime, on October 8, SLPR and the Beacon announced their intent to explore a larger journalism alliance. When I spoke to Margaret Wolf Freivogel, editor at the Beacon and one of its founders, she explained that Beyond November wasn't exactly the catalyst for this alliance -- rather, the idea had been "in the wind" ever since the Beacon launched five years ago, and gained momentum recently thanks to conversations between the the chairman of the Beacon board, Richard K. Weil Jr., and SLPR general manager Tim Eby. Still, Beyond November offers a window into what editorial collaboration between these organizations might look like (with the added participation, in this case, of the Nine Network). Here's how Beyond November works, at a glance. Staffing: Dedicated Managing Editor and Radio...

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3 Collaboration Lessons From Social Media Campaign for 'Half the Sky'

ahirschdc@gmail.com — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 06:00:00 -0800

"Have you heard about this 'Half the Sky' thing?" my friend Karen wrote to me on Facebook, referring to the film/book/multi-platform phenomenon that has gotten tremendous media attention as of late. Later that same day, several other friends posted about the project, and I saw references on Twitter as well. This ubiquity is no accident -- it's the outcome of an ambitious social media campaign, and guess what? That campaign is the result of our favorite subject here at Collaboration Central. (That would be collaboration.) In case you aren't familiar with "Half the Sky" (full title: "Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide"), it's a book by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn that inspired a documentary produced by Show of Force; the film recently aired on PBS. More broadly, "Half the Sky" is an ongoing campaign to raise awareness of the problems facing women and girls worldwide, from sex trafficking to barriers to education and economic opportunity. Watch the trailer for the film: Here are just a few examples of the social media campaign's success: Tweets about "Half the Sky" generated 1 billion impressions between October 1st and 3rd (the film aired on PBS October 1st and 2nd). The hashtag #halfthesky trended on both nights of broadcast, generating 265 tweets per minute one night, and 175 tweets per minute the next. Through a partnership with GetGlue, users could unlock a special "Half the Sky" sticker to be entered into a...

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New Jersey News Collaborative Brings TV, Radio, Public Media, Hyper-Locals Together

ahirschdc@gmail.com — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 06:00:00 -0800

Last month the Knight Foundation announced the winners of the 2012 Knight Community Information Challenge, who will collectively receive $3.67 million in matching funds to "help them take a leadership role in addressing issues relevant to their communities." One of the winners: the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, the lead funder of the New Jersey News Collaborative. I recently interviewed Chris Daggett, the foundation's president and CEO, via email about the scope and vision of the Collaborative, what success will look like in one year and in five years, and how collaboration figures into the foundation's funding priorities. Below is an edited transcript of our exchange. Editor's note: The original version of this post said that there were no commercial television stations in Oregon - that is incorrect. We apologize for the mistake. Collaboration Central: Why does New Jersey need the New Jersey News Collaborative? What need (or needs) will the cooperative meet that is/are currently going unmet? Daggett: Being sandwiched between the New York and Philadelphia media markets makes it hard for anyone in New Jersey to get high-quality coverage of the concerns and challenges we face in our state. There is no commercial television station in New Jersey, and our newspapers are shadows of their former selves. Without reliable news and investigative reporting, our residents cannot make informed decisions about the issues that impact their lives and their children's...

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The Case for Unity Among Non-Profit, Community, and Public Media

jstearns@freepress.net — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 06:00:00 -0800

Co-authored with Candace Clement The radically shifting landscape of media and technology has sparked a renaissance in non-profit and public media in the United States. As a perfect storm of economic and technological changes shakes the foundation of commercial media, journalists, funders, and local citizens are looking to public interest-oriented, mission-driven news organizations as a critical part of the solution. People who might never have considered a non-profit business model before -- like longtime journalists and tech entrepreneurs -- are launching vibrant, non-profit startups across the country. Making the Case for Unity A new report by Free Press argues, however, that despite all of this attention, non-profit media has yet to become greater than the sum of its parts. They serve different, albeit intersecting, audiences. Their membership and funding varies. They focus on different topics or geographies. Having a diverse media system is important, but too often these groups also define themselves through these differences. Surveying the different models, missions and approaches in the non-profit journalism sector makes it feel less like a unified whole, and more like a collection of parts. The report, "Greater than the Sum," argues that we need to begin constructing a new identity for non-profit journalism and media in America, one that illustrates the central role these institutions play in our nation. In addition, we must examine the media policies...

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