What is a story? “Journalism: Storytelling with purpose”

A pure definition

• A Story is an arrangement of words and images that re-create life-like characters and events.

• By how a storyteller describes and arranges a description of a story's events, issues and ideas, the storyteller gains the attention of an audience.

• To sustain that interest, the action of a story is often presented as revolving around resolving some human need: to feel loved, to be in control of one's life and fate, to be able to avenge wrongs, overcome obstacles, discover and understand the meaning and purpose of life.

• To reward the interest of an audience, the storyteller arranges the elements of their story to fulfill the issues it raises.

Where’s the story here?

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqXmqJgVHdc

Words?

• Do you need words to tell a story? • What makes a story powerful? • What makes a story something people CARE about?

Journalism is a process in which a

reporter uses verification and

storytelling to make a subject newsworthy

What makes a good story?

• Creating a good story means finding and verifying important/interesting information and presenting it in a way that engages the audience • is about something the audience decides is

interesting/important• Uses storytelling to make important news interesting

• Anything can be news, but not everything is newsworthy • A good story does more than INFORM, it adds VALUE

to the topic • How a story is told is more important than the topic • Contains multiple viewpoints, sources, expertise….

Good stories are important AND interesting

• Pitfalls:• Time is frozen• Character is missing• Stories lack meaning • Relevancy is assumed• Storytelling is predictable • Limited use of digital media to amplify storytelling

Good stories are important AND interesting

Unfreeze Time- People are active and do things- have your stories SHOW

that - Follow a character through a complication and show how

they resolve it (make it a narrative)

Develop Character

- Avoid “protestor” or “investigative officer”- a little more reporting can provide details to avoid stereotypes and provide interesting dimensions

Good stories are important AND interesting

Tell the audience what it means - Tell your audience why the world works the way it does, why a

trend is happening, why something is or isn't taking place (be an AUTHENTICATOR!)

Prove Relevancy - Just declaring something “news” doesn’t make it relevant;

make connections for the audience and make it impact audience. Make people think they should take time to read this story because it’s potentially important to them or their community. NEVER assume relevancy!!

Example

• Follow along with article, “Dirty Medicine”

Example of relevancy: “Dirty Medicine” http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2010/1007.blake.html

When Thomas Shaw gets worked up, he twists in his chair and kneads his hand. Or he paces about in his tube socks grumbling, “They’re trying to destroy us,” and “The whole thing is a giant scam.” And Shaw, the founder of a medical device maker called Retractable Technologies, spends a lot of time being agitated.

One of the topics that gets him most riled up these days is bloodstream infections. And with good reason—while most people rarely think about them, these are the most dangerous of the hospital-acquired bugs that afflict one in ten patients in the United States. Their spread has helped to make contact with our health care system the fifth leading cause of death in this country.

Good stories have strong central characters

• People are naturally interested in other people • Think of what kinds of information would make a character in a story

come alive• More than an anecdote- getting quotes and placing it in a story

provides WORDS but little VOICE• You must include the DETAIL about the character/circumstance so

the reader can CONNECT• When interviewing someone, give them the opportunity to reveal

something about themselves and their character• Ask what they are doing and WHY • Ask what they are feeling and WHY• Ask what they think and WHY they believe what they do

Example

• Thomas Shaw is a lanky fifty-nine-year-old man with dark eyes and a shock of gray hair that gives him a bit of a mad scientist air. Growing up, he lived in Mexico and Arizona, where his father worked as a chemist (among other things, the elder Shaw invented the first nitrogen test for plants). Shaw describes his childhood home as a kind of frenetic laboratory where science and math problems were worked out on a chalkboard that hung over the dinner table.

Good stories use detail

• OBSERVATION key in finding DETAIL • Stories built on important/interesting themes supported

by small but revealing details are more complete because they give the reader something to grab onto

• A good story is not built just on facts, but on the right facts

Example

• Given these facts, you might expect that hospitals would be lining up to buy Shaw’s product. But that is not the case, even though his company is offering to match whatever price medical facilities are paying for their current, infection-prone IV catheter syringes. In fact, since the device hit the market two years ago, Retractable has sold fewer than 20,000 units, mostly to one New York hospital. Often, the company’s sales team can’t even get in the door to show their wares to purchasing agents. “The product does exactly what it is supposed to do,” Shaw says. “But it has one fatal flaw. Right there at the bottom of the handle it says Retractable Technologies.”

Good stories connect to deeper themes

• Best stories are elemental• A mother’s love for her children, a husband’s pride for

country…

• Look for a story of why things happen the way they do and then look for a way to tell that story

• Sometimes someone behind the scenes is more important than those in the public eye

• Find an iconic image to represent the core of a story; thinking like a photographer can help journalists focus on the core of a story as they navigate their way through the fog of detail

Example

• This is hardly the first time Shaw has found his path to market blocked. In fact, he has spent the last fifteen years watching his potentially game-changing inventions collect dust on warehouse shelves. And the same is true of countless other small medical suppliers. Their plight is just the most visible outgrowth of the tangled system hospitals use to purchase their supplies—a system built on a seemingly minor provision in Medicare law that few people even know about. It’s a system that has stifled innovation and kept lifesaving medical devices off the market. And while it’s supposed to curb prices, it may actually be driving up the cost of medical supplies, the second largest expenditure for our nation’s hospitals and clinics and a major contributor to the ballooning cost of health care, which consumes nearly a fifth of our gross domestic product.

Good stories explore tensions

• Tension makes life, and the news, interesting • Can be external (between two candidates)• Can be internal (struggle on facing choices)

• Reporting on a central’s character decision-making process can be both interesting and relevant • Pulls the reader in to share the process

• Avoid “bi-polar” approach

Example

• This is hardly the first time Shaw has found his path to market blocked. In fact, he has spent the last fifteen years watching his potentially game-changing inventions collect dust on warehouse shelves. And the same is true of countless other small medical suppliers. Their plight is just the most visible outgrowth of the tangled system hospitals use to purchase their supplies—a system built on a seemingly minor provision in Medicare law that few people even know about. It’s a system that has stifled innovation and kept lifesaving medical devices off the market. And while it’s supposed to curb prices, it may actually be driving up the cost of medical supplies, the second largest expenditure for our nation’s hospitals and clinics and a major contributor to the ballooning cost of health care, which consumes nearly a fifth of our gross domestic product.

Good stories capture emotions

• Emotion commands attention and creates a relevancy of shared feelings between the character and the reader

• Must manage your own emotions (objectivity) while integrating sentiment into a story

• Avoid EXCESSIVE emotion or misinformation to produce emotion • Usually, less is best….and don’t use hyperboles

• Rather than TELL the reader how to feel, offer DETAILS so the reader can make their own judgments and create a natural emotional connection with a character

Example

• The senselessness of this quandary has driven Shaw to distraction. “We are devoting our entire lives to something we know is going to fail,” he told me during my final visit to his office. “If we expected anything else, it would be devastating. If somebody’s holding you under water and they let you up and you think you’re going to escape, you’re going to go insane.” He was in one of those moods where he paces about, his mind flitting from outrage to outrage so quickly that it can be hard to follow the flow, much less stop it. As I got up to leave, he trailed me down the stairs and out to the parking lot, where he stood amid the gravel and grit in his socks. Even as I backed my car out of the lot, he was still talking. The question is whether anyone out there is listening.

Good stories provide context

• Ask, “what does my audience need to know?” • What background would a newcomer need to know? What

do people need to know so they care?

Example

• Breaking into the medical supply market has always been tough, in part because for decades the business has been dominated by a handful of behemoth suppliers. In the case of syringes, the incumbent heavyweight has long been Becton Dickinson, or BD, a New Jersey–based company that controls 70 percent of the syringe market and has a lengthy history of trampling competitors. As early as 1960, BD was brought up on Justice Department charges for its anticompetitive practices—among them price fixing, buying up patents to kill its rivals’ innovations, and forcing hospitals to buy its syringes to get other essential supplies, some of which were only produced by BD.

Good stories surprise the reader

• Surprise in a news story can take a couple of forms, information you didn’t know or something you didn’t expect

• In a story, the surprise is planned and strategically placed

Example

• One of the topics that gets him most riled up these days is bloodstream infections. And with good reason—while most people rarely think about them, these are the most dangerous of the hospital-acquired bugs that afflict one in ten patients in the United States. Their spread has helped to make contact with our health care system the fifth leading cause of death in this country.

Good stories empower the reader

• Purpose of journalism is to give people the info they need to make better decisions…..in other words, journalism is supposed to empower

• Informs reader, but intention that they will also use that info later on

• Empowering the reader involves anticipating how the info might be used and what questions readers may have

• View reader as a decision-maker instead of a consumer

Storytelling in Journalism: How to tell a story in the digital age

• Has storytelling been lost in the shuffle of trying to get information out more quickly?

Storytelling through people

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2JkpLMdOag

Multimedia Storytelling

• A multimedia story is some combination of text, still photographs, video clips, audio, graphics and interactivity presented on a Web site in a nonlinear format in which the information in each medium is complementary, not redundant.

• Nonlinear means that rather than reading a rigidly structured single narrative, the user chooses how to navigate through the elements of a story. Not redundant means that rather than having a text version of a story accompanied by a video clip that essentially tells the same story, different parts of a story are told using different media. The key is using the media form - video, audio, photos, text, animation - that will present a segment of a story in the most compelling and informative way.

Multimedia examples

• Good- http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2010/04/meraux_foundation_embroiled_in.html

• Not so Good- http://www.oregonlive.com/business/index.ssf/2010/04/oregon_treasury_employees_wine.html

What isn’t a multimedia story?

• Sites such as CNN, the Washington Post, NPR and MSNBC.com are multimedia sites. They have text. They have video clips. They have audio. They have still photographs. They have interactive graphics. But the main stories on these sites are often linear and produced in either text or video or audio to stand alone.

• The text is often augmented with photos, as it would be in a newspaper or magazine. The video is usually the same version that appears on television. Rarely are video, text, still photos, audio and graphics integrated into the same story.

• Usually, they are stand-alone stories, each produced for a different media about the same subject, that are then aggregated into multimedia packages.

Examples

• CNN-http://edition.cnn.com/2014/08/02/world/meast/mideast-crisis/index.html?hpt=hp_tl

• NBC- http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/ebola-virus-outbreak/ebola-patient-dr-kent-brantly-arrives-u-s-hospital-liberia-n171241

Choosing a story

• Before you venture into the field to shoot a story, gather as much information as possible to put together a rough storyboard - an outline of the story that lays out the multimedia possibilities.

• This means doing a preliminary interview with the source or sources for background, getting a basic idea of what to expect in the field, and looking up anything the sources have published in print or on the Web.

• Then collect as many available visuals -- photos, videos, maps and graphics -- as you can from your sources or from the Web to get an idea of what the story's components may be. Track down any previous stories on the topic -- print, video, radio or Web.

Practice

• How would you make this story INTERESTING?

http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2010/02/19/the-internet-makes-you-smarter/

Activity

**Please read along with your handout** • You will be divided into 6 groups of about 4 or 5 students• With your handout, you are going to rotate stations around the

room, going to a separate “section” of the newspaper each time • You will 15 minutes at each station to choose ONE news story

and analyze for the elements of a good story. • Please DO NOT write on the newspapers• I will rotate the room to check on your discussions- everyone in

your group will turn something in