As we all know, every new medium goes through a stage of transition. This aspect of a new medium has been discussed in detail, from McLuhan to Nick Bilton. What happens is that, for a while, storytellers will publish their stories in the new medium using the language they control; usually the reflection of a old medium associated language. There are many examples of this happening – some of them not as modern as you might expect, like this early printed book with hand written initials and another example of a book, with the open spaces ready for the drawing of those initials – and one of the most common examples is that of the early television broadcasts.

Nick Bilton, on his book I Live in the Future and Here’s How it Works, tells us about those early TV broadcasts where, if you closed your eyes, you’d think you where listening to a radio show. Actually, those early TV broadcasts where made just like radio shows – the previous language mastered by storytellers. You can experience it for yourself on this video, from a very early TV broadcast by BBC, in 1936.

Nowadays, in the digital realm – which includes both the Internet, ereaders and all that we call mobile, like smartphones and tablets –, I believe we are experiencing a stage of transition, like the ones other storytellers like us experienced before. What has been published on digital supports, mostly has a very clear resemblance with languages from other media. One of the best examples, for me, that mirror this transition stage is that of the journalistic article. If we compare the following images (all from The New York Times, but I could have chosen any other news publication), we can see that things haven’t changed that much with the journalistic article, regardless of it’s mean of distribution (printed, online or tablet):

“Dinkins Turns to Industry Experience to Lure Films Back to City”, Michael Janofsky New York Times, November 25, 1992.

“Alaskan Road Trip, 500 Feet Up”, Sarah Maslin Nir, New York Times, February 21, 2010.

“Alexander Ovechkin, the Mad Russian”, Charles McGrath, New York Times, April 9, 2010.

The basic format for a journalistic article remains the same: a title, one picture and the body text. This happens, regardless of the platform for publishing it.

Back to the discussion about word usage. What I’ve been founding is that the word multimedia also relates a lot to this transitional stage for the digital medium. The word in itself, inserted on its publishing usage, reflects that digital platforms can be used to publish more than one type of media – and that’s true –, be it text, pictures, audio, video, etc. But, since we’re on that transitional stage, the word doesn’t infer a rethinking of the story to be published by the means of its publishing platform. On the three examples above, you have multimedia articles. Each article has a picture and text – that’s multimedia! A video on Youtube is multimedia. A podcast is also multimedia and so is a slide show. What I mean is that the word itself and its usage completely connects with what we’ve all been publishing online (like this article of mine!) and that’s nothing more than the usage of old language on a new medium.

As I’ve stated before, when discussing digital storytelling, I use more and more the word mixmedia. When we refer to a mixmedia journalistic article – I’m keeping this as the main example for my thesis, but you can change it with any other form of digital storytelling – we’re impelled to think beyond the traditional idea of a journalistic article. Mixmedia in itself relates with the usage of different multimedia tools in order to tell a story. Of course that you can still think of this and make a digital article like the ones showed before, but the most important fact about the usage of this two words is that with mixmedia you’ll think about using different multimedia tools in order to tell your story (I’ve written about this before here).

Our aim, for digital storytelling, should be that of understanding that each new medium goes through a stage of transition and, during that stage, what we do with it, for storytelling purposes, is nothing more than use old languages on a new medium. Having this concept fully understood will enable us to move forward and work in order to find the new medium new language. Once we find this new language (like in so many mediums before digital), we’ll start using it, producing stories that feel so much natural for our audiences than the things we’ve been doing before. Just compare the above BBC TV broadcast with what you’re watching at home right now.

On a final note I want to share an example of a move to the right direction, regarding digital storytelling. Just before the end of 2012, The New York Times published online the amazing digital story Snowfall. This is a great example of a mixmedia digital story and one that can point all of us into a digital language direction. The difference between this article and the one I’ve showed before is huge and, somehow, Snowfall ‘feels’ much more natural for a web browser than the examples above. This can be seen as a signal that a new language for this medium is being found. The audience to this The New York Times digital story was amazing and, again, we can relate it to the natural feeling (more than the ‘wow’ feeling, in my opinion) that all of us had to this story. Snowfall is, more than a multimedia story, a real mixmedia story, where all the bits that make the story are related with that narrative and with the publishing platform used for it.

This is why I’m using mixmedia instead of multimedia, whenever I discuss digital storytelling in the future.

One of my first thoughts was: “Android needs a lot of reinventing, from bottom up!”

Of the myriad of articles about the result of this trial, one of my favorites has been Kyle Vanhemert’s, for Fast Company ’Apple’s Big Verdict: Bad For Usability, But It Won’t Stop True Innovation’ (you can read it here). One of Kyle’s argument is about how some of the patents Apple owns could (should?) be considered usability standarts for multitouch interfaces. Kyle writes this, about pinch-to-zoom: “It’s very much possible that pinch-to-zoom is the best way of zooming in on a map. Forcing smartphone developers to come up with a different way of doing things for the sake of coming up with a different way of doing things is outrageously stupid. And, needless to say, it would be a headache for users.“

I started thinking how I would reinvent the interface for Android. This article shows some of the ideas I’ve had so far.

I hope this article can help start a discussion about designing interfaces for multitouch. Such a discussion could lead to some crowdsourced solutions, without patent constrains.

There’s a lot of problems that must be addressed in every digital interface design and, since last Friday, some of them are pretty hard to solve. I didn’t want to take my luck at tackling each one of those problems (like pinch-to-zoom, for example), but I wanted to rethink some major features needed for a smartphone operating system interface.

What you’ll find in this article are my ideas for some of those features, like home screens, folders and apps organization, navigating between apps, etc.

My first concept is really a no brainer: Smartphones are hand-held devices, usually handled by one hand alone. These gadgets are mostly a ‘thumbs device’. What this means is that most of it’s basic operations should be made possible while handling your device with one hand. In order to do that, you’ll have operate the phone with your thumb. Ah, the beauty of the opposing thumbs!!

Before going to the pictures and explanations of my ideas, a simple disclaimer: I’ve use a Samsung Galaxy S3 device as the base picture for the sketchs on this article. I found the picture on www.pc-os.org. All the applications icons I’ve used for my sketchs are taken from Google Play and serve only as an example (and as a display of my own preferences!).

This is the home-screen when the phone is locked. Simple, it has the basic information you’ll need from it.

The home-screen can be personalized with feeds. These feeds can be from apps installed on your device, from folders containing apps or from websites (like Techcrunch in this example). A number will indicate the updates each feed has.

Of course, the wallpaper can be changed by you, whenever you feel like it. This one I found online with the help of Google. If you like it, there’s a caption on the picture with the URL for downloading it.

To unlock your phone just tap at the bottom of the screen and use Android’s brilliant ‘unlocking’ system.

With the phone unlocked, you can tap any of the feeds to expand it’s view. The expanded area becomes scrollable.

Touch any article on the scroll area and you are taken to the app of the feed. On this example, we’re taken to Chrome for Android. The website on this example is StarkInside.

Touch the phone’s ‘home button’ and you’re back on the home-screen.

When you first use your phone, you’ll need to ‘tell it’ if you’re right or left-handed. This will influence the interface, as you’ll see ahead. All my examples are designed for a right-handed user.

From the home-screen, by sliding your thumb from left to right, starting just outside the screen, you’ll access your folders and apps.

This circular menu has all your apps and folders, organized as you wish.

With your thumb moving just up and down, spin the menu to access everything you’ll need.

There’s and additional menu to access Google Play, create new folders and access the phone’s settings. Let’s go to Google Play.

We’ve just installed Zite, one of my favorite apps. The word NEW lets you know this is a new app and it requires that you organize it. If you leave the app on the menu, without moving it, the next time you’ll access the menu, the word NEW will not display.

To move any app inside a folder, just tap and hold on it. Then, drag the app to the folder you want to use. Similar, to delete any app or folder, just drag it outside the circular menu and it will be deleted from your phone.

Making a new folder is just as easy, just tap the + sign on the side menu. When a new folder is created, you can type it’s name and choose it’s color for better reference inside the circular menu.

OK, back to the circular menu:

To access your apps inside a folder, tap on that folder.

The folder expands, showing you it’s content. Tap again to close it. Since the menu is circular, you can have infinite folders opened (you’ll just need a lot of thumb-spinning!).

From our ‘Social’ folder, we’ve chosen to open Google Plus.

For ease of usage, you can access a menu with your most used apps. This is a menu that you cannot change. You can access it by pulling with your thumb, from left to right.

This is why it is important to ‘tell’ your phone if you’re left or right-handed. The circle ‘center’ for the menu will change in order that the rest of your hand doesn’t cover the circular menu content.

Just choose between one of your most used applications. Thumbs up!

It’s ‘Cut the Rope’ time! One of my favorite mobile games.

But how can you see which apps are opened on you phone and how to access it?

On the bottom of the screen there was an area called ‘Under the hood’, remember?

Scroll your thumb horizontally in that area and you’ll see all the apps that are running on your phone.

Just scroll to view those apps and tap to bring one to the screen.

This is Flipboard, another one of my favorites!

And how about closing an app? Simple, X is for closing… just draw an X in the screen with your thumb. You’ll be asked if you want to close that app.

And you’ll be back at your home-screen:

As you can see this is just a very small effort for reinventing an operating system interface for mobile phones. It is also a lot of fun to do!!!

This is just my humble contribution to what I would love to see: an overall discussion about touch interface design, shared by many.

Crowdsourcing design! Without patents or any other of those things…

Now it’s your time, how would you do it?

Please share your thoughts and/or links on the comments bellow.

The long wait is finally over. Today, Adam Westbrook’s* ebook Inside The Story has been released and what a treat it is!

The ebook Inside the Story: a masterclass in digital storytelling from the people who do it best is a collection of 20+ articles by several award winning and innovative storytellers, from all ranges of digital narratives expertise – film makers, designers, multimedia producers, etc – compiled in one tome with the sole purpose of helping everyone into mastering the art form that is digital storytelling.

With some impressive collaborators, like Brian Storm from Mediastorm, or Andrew DeVigal from The New York Times – just to name two ‘giants’ –; Inside the Story cleverly uses a 200 word limit formula to convey important and ease of use knowledge snippets of invaluable value. This ebook just asks to be used repeatedly through out one’s digital storytelling process, from the planning stage to the editing room – there is always some precious word of advice inside this small ebook for every stage of a digital narrative production.

One of my favorite articles is the first one, by Brian Storm. In a clear way, Brian let us know that for really special projects (personal projects), time spent on location and on the editing room must be free of deadline restrains. “Essentially, we don’t publish until we don’t know how to make a story any stronger”, he says.

While some could see this as a luxury, a utopia, it does teaches us, ever-learning-storytellers, something of great truth: Work, edit, work, edit some more; don’t let the annoyance of the creative process let you walk away from your vision of the story you’re working on! I know I really need this advice, having worked on my fair share of projects that where ‘sent out to the world’ just good-enough (or not even that!!!).

As a final remark, please note the usage of the word “stronger” on Brian’s sentence. It’s not better, it’s “stronger”, because that’s what really counts on every storytelling.

I was lucky enough to be able to have a couple of questions answered by Adam about his Inside the Story project:

How do you evaluate the current panorama in digital storytelling?

Digital storytelling is still new, particularly on certain platforms and mediums. We’re seeing a lot more people tell stories, which is fantastic, but I think the quality falls short of expectations sometimes, in both the mainstream media and with independent producers.

What was your main goal to publish Inside The Story?

Inside The Story is for those storytellers who feel that their stories are good but not as good as they think they could be. There are many books and websites about what we do, but I felt many focus on the basics – how to use a camera, etc. This book isn’t about the basics, it’s about how to take your storytelling to the next level.

How do you believe that your book will help on jump-starting the creation of more digital narratives?

I hope Inside the Story will encourage more people to pick up their camera, or computer and push themselves to create really high quality compelling narratives. I hope people who’ve thought about giving up will keep trying, and eventually we’ll collectively raise the bar of digital storytelling across the board.

In which way do you think that the current ‘digital distribution revolution’ can engage our digital storytellers? 

It’s faster, cheaper, easier to create content, and to publish it. I hope we’ll see more independent publishers both creating and providing a platform for this form of high quality storytelling.

Is digital storytelling a career worth pursuing, for newly professionals? Do you see a future in it?

We’ll always need storytelling. It’s how we understand the world around us and connect  with distant, but important issues.To make it work for yourself though you need passion, drive and total commitment. There’s no easy route to being good at this – just practice, and a refusal to give up.

And, might I add, books like Inside the Story, to help us out with improving our stories for digital distribution.

As a final note – wishing that my modest review as helped you, dear reader, to go and by this amazingly helpful ebook –, I would like to add that Inside the Story is priced at a mere £3,50 and all the book’s selling profits revert to Kiva, the developing world entrepreneurship charity. Another useful information: the ebook will only sell for 4 weeks, so get your copy as soon as possible!

Here’s hoping to catch your digital narratives online, with reflections of the fabulous advices from Inside the Story!

* Adam Westbrook is a multimedia producer, film maker, lecturer and blogger in London. He’s passionate about digital storytelling and has made documentaries in China and Iraq. He blogs about new ways of doing journalism and lectures in video journalism at Kingston University, London.

I try to explain that reading will not go away, that text is the best medium (medium as in the singular of media, in multimedia) for such a great part of our storytelling. This is also the case with acting on stage, which is such a great medium to present visual storytelling on theaters.

Nevertheless, there’s a catch here.

Almost every new medium started out with the repurposing of old media practices. On the first printed books, some white space was kept, on the pages, so that illustrators could draw initial caps on it. Early radio shows weren’t more than theater shows aired to people’s home sets. Early TV shows where just mere radio shows with pictures, filmed with stationary cameras, since producers didn’t know what could be done with motion to improve the medium’s storytelling.

On his book I Live in the Future and Here’s How it Works, Nick Bilton states about this subject: “There’s an all too human tendency to believe that what we know and experience now is the way it will and always should be”. He adds “The business of storytelling is doing the same thing with the Internet. We’re taking our existing content and simply aggregating it to the Web; we’re filming radio shows”.

What history can teach us is that almost all new media not only didn’t replaced old media, but it also went on to invent its’ own language and paradigms.

On Inventing the Medium, Janet H. Murray writes: “The agenda for filmmakers in the beginning of the twentieth century was not to get better and better at photographing plays, but to figure out how to use the camera and the plasticity of film to invent movies”.

With the latest maturation of the web, which jump started with the help of the tablet launch, we’re on the tipping point for reinventing our narratives and quit the habit of repurposing old media practices on digital. We need to do this because, as Janet H. Murray so simply puts it: “There is no such thing as content without form”.

And the form is changing with the medium. Right now, we’re witnessing the mixing of television and newspapers, with the latest starting to produce great video content for their websites. But even this isn’t all that is needed. We can expect more mixing in the future.

In the end, what we must answer is the question “With all these multimedia tools at my disposal right now, what can I use that best serves my storytelling on digital platforms?”

Human beings are hard wired to tell stories. It’s an evolutionary need for the survival of our species. What we tend to forget is that text itself, but also pictorial representations of the world, are a human invention. In that sense, video, audio and graphics are also communication tools invented by us. And just as with text, our brains learned to use these tools for our own profit.

It makes perfect sense, historically and cognitively, to incorporate all of these new digital enabled communication tools in our storytelling. One century ago, the usage of photography on our printed nonfiction was just as ‘revolutionary’, as today’s mixture of text with video and audio can be.

Another question we need to answer: “How can I fully engage with the digital readers”.

Nick Bilton writes: “Great storytelling, incisive reporting, and thoughtful editing will still prevail—but they will need to be presented to you and me in a different form to go beyond mere information.”, he then adds: “But there’s one other thing I discovered the next-generation consumer will pay for online: better experiences, which often grow out of better storytelling.”

As media professionals, we can wait for the rise of this new storytelling method (and it will happen) or we can jump-start it right now. What we need is to view our community storytelling experiments like the primordial soup, where life itself began through the trial and error of combining different elements.

Steve Johnson, on his book Where good Ideas Come From, contributes to the understanding of how we can fast-forward our collective learning: “If there is a single maxim that runs through this book’s arguments, it is that we are often better served by connecting ideas than we are by protecting them.” More: “The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.” Finally: “It’s not that the network itself is smart; it’s that the individuals get smarter because they’re connected to the network”.

Do I think that we have already a good example of what the future of digital storytelling will be like? No, I don’t. But I do believe that experiments like The New York Times One Year At War are on the right track. Also worth mentioning are France24 story Rape in Congo and CNN Slavery’s Last Stronghold.

MediaStorm, a digital narratives studio, is also producing great online nonfiction. The story A Darkness Visible: Afghanistan is a visual and audio masterpiece, an important testimonial to the storytelling power of photo and audio mixed together. Maggie Steber’s documentary work here is just superb.

Do I think that the solutions I present for redesigning digital narratives  are the future of digital storytelling? No, I don’t. They are just but an excuse to try to start the discussion and experimentation needed to get us somewhere.

What I know is that an ever growing group of clever people are thinking and experimenting with various multimedia tools and that, eventually, some kind of foundation for digital narratives will arise. As Steve Johnson tells us: “Call it the 10/10 rule: a decade to build the new platform, and a decade for it to find a mass audience”; but more than a decade has already passed since the boom of the World Wide Web!

Janet H. Murray, when writing about the reinvention of digital media, has focused her attention on the challenges the newspaper industry is facing: “A paper newspaper is a well-established template that we know how to map to cognitive schema so that we can take in the multiple stories it is telling us through media conventions like headlines, columns, and lead paragraphs. The templates of online news can potentially contain much more information-moving images, original documents, previous stories, interactive visualizations, reader comments, recommendation systems-but we have yet to establish a stable media form comparable to the paper newspaper. Creating the templates and conventions that will organize this expanded universe of news reporting is an ongoing collective task for digital designers.”

On his side, Nick Bilton leaves no place for soft words on the future of the news media publishing: “This new way of consuming information and storytelling online doesn’t bode well for individuals or companies that create mediocre content and cookie-cutter storytelling”; even if he ends with an essential piece of forecasting for a business that is struggling so much with economic problems: “Long-form content will not disappear even if we consume it in forms different from paper, even if it comes with embedded videos or with sensors and augmentation as part of the narrative. And people will still pay for all these forms, with significant and meaningful content as a crucial part of that experience”.

As a final though, I defend that traditional media publishers must take this chance to pursuit, in full speed, the objective of developing the basis for the next step of storytelling. Traditionally we’ve been slow followers of digital innovation and it has showed on our business results. It’s time to grab the steering wheel again and be on the front line of the reinvention of a medium that has been part of our DNA for so long: nonfiction long-form narrative.

Touch the image above to watch my digital narrative experience of ‘The Final Voyage’

Having written about the need to explore new forms of digital narratives and how to produce them, I wanted to try out myself in designing such a narrative. Since I’m not a writer, neither a photographer – and also because of the time it would take me to produce content by myself –, I wanted to find some content I could use and transform it into a digital narrative.

This was not, by far, a perfect solution since it made me use content that was produced for other type of distribution. Furthermore, video editing proved to be tricky, since I was working without the raw material that goes into a video, like the soundtrack and different takes.

You will see, on my experimentation below, many examples of both my lack of expertise in video editing and the downside of using content produce with other goals in mind.

The content I used came from NASA’s website. Not only does this website provide a huge collection of different media, like videos, pictures and texts, but it also posts these materials with a Creative Commons license. I’ve chosen the magnificent article written by Cheryl L. Mansfield, ‘The Final Voyage’, that tells the story about the Atlantis STS-135 mission, the last one of the Space Shuttle program. I’ve also used the videos, pictures and information available on the website about this mission.

As far as I could, I restrained myself from changing the text of the article, having just replaced two paragraphs with some video.

I also used two pictures found on Wikipedia, also under Creative Commons License and a video from the White House.

A disclaimer: in all the editing and manipulation I’ve made on the content used, it was never my intention to disregard the hard work and expertise that went on the making of that content, the work done by professionals much better than me. The following experiment is just that, an experiment and an example of what can be done. It wasn’t made with any commercial intention whatsoever.

I’ve used Klynt software to make this digital narrative. Klynt is an application developed by Honkytonk in France and is one of the best digital storytelling tools I’ve found so far. I will write about it in bigger details on the following days.

Nevertheless, so far, Klynt is a Flash based application and since this is a WordPress blog I had to host the final file on a personal URL.

You can find my digital narrative experience of ‘The Final Voyage’ here.

As a final note, I would love to receive as much feedback as possible on this exercise. Please feel free to share this link and comment as much as you wish. All insights will be replied and very much appreciated.

Regardless of the great job the network was doing with their coverage, I sensed that there was ‘more’ going on and my iPad become my ‘second screen’, to get live online information from Egypt.

I followed the same behavior when Osama bin Laden was killed by a United States special forces military unit, on May 2, 2011 (this time turning the TV to CNN). The same thing happened when, on July 22, 2011, the Norway attacks where perpetrated. The death of Steve Jobs, on October 5, 2011, made me do it again.

As it turns out, I was not alone with this ‘second screen’ behavior and my ‘digital quest’ for further information. Various studies reveal that, while watching TV, audiences are also online (here is one of those studies). It has also become common knowledge that most big events news break first on Twitter – some defend it started with the Hudson river landing, on January 15, 2009.

As I see it, this is how such behavior works: A user gets a tweet on her stream about a breaking news. Felling interested on the subject, this user senses a need to ‘validate’ that piece of information (140 characters). To do so, she will turn to the TV to find a news media trusted brand that can validate the Twitter information. Since most of us still think about TV as the place to follow breaking news, our user will stay ‘glued’ to a broadcast about the event. Nevertheless, being a ‘digital’ user, she will keep browsing online and on social networks to be able to get more information than what the TV broadcaster is giving her.

It is this need for more information, about something that is airing on the TV, added with a digital habit of being able to connect with huge streams of information and people online, that develops the multi-tasking habit of the second screen.

We’ve all read or heard about the second screen experience. In the last months, we’ve witnessed an amount of online services and applications launched to address this ‘need’. But upon further look, one can evaluate that these new services are mostly based on the entertainment side of the second screen usage.

Applications like Yahoo’s IntoNow, or British Zeebox are great fun when it comes to entertainment, enhancing the TV watching experience a lot.

Even the American newspaper The New York Times did a second screen feature, on last year’s Oscar night. It was a great experiment, but it was also based on a entertainment event.

I think about the second screen concept and believe there is a place for ‘live’ coverage of breaking news, done not only on the TV station’s websites, but also by traditional news media print publishers, through their websites.

If I’m right about how the ‘Twitter – TV – Trusted News Brand’ cycle works, than news publisher can fill these ‘trusted news brand’ shoes. Any publication that has a community of readers can use the second screen approach to further explore their relationship with that group of readers.

Also, if we think about traditional print news media assets for second screening, those companies have really interesting content that can make the difference during the early stages of a breaking news: their archive, the staff opinions and the power to ask for other opinions from the publication’s set of contacts. For further enrichment of the experience, journalists can curate and display content from social media; chosen Twitter hashtags can be filtered and displayed; pictures can be turned into slideshows; etc.

One of the problems TV companies face with breaking news is that, usually they don’t have enough material and data to ‘keep’ things moving forward. Live means the need for having people talking to the camera. You can have some specialist talking through the phone, while broadcasting footage (again and again) of the breaking event, but it is not a very nice experience for the audience.

TV broadcast also suffers from a lack of real estate to show related information. Since TV news are based on moving pictures and people, the amount of free screen space available to display other information is very low. Therefore, the TV experience can become very linear – one thing after the other.

On the other hand, if we design specific webpages for the second screen experience, we can use the available real estate to offer a non-linear experience. Editorial hierarchy can be translated through the design of the page and the amount of various contents to be delivered live on the page can vastly outtake that of the TV broadcast.

As I see it, one key element for a breaking news, or big event, second screen solution is the designing of a specific webpage, with curation of content and different information feeds in mind. For both breaking news or big events (like elections night, sports big competitions, Oscar night, etc.) what audiences are looking for, on the second screen, is validation and as much information and reactions as possible. This cannot be provided easily, as we’ve seen, by TV broadcasting, thus becoming mandatory to be served on the second screen.

Another key element on implementing a second screen solution is the need to have a newsroom with the right mind set. What the audience ‘out there’ is looking for is to make sense of something; to understand, not only what is happening, but also the implications of that event. People are looking for guidance, for opinions, for depth.

The breaking news, or event team, working on the newsroom should produce and provide answers to that need from the audience, but also find other possible answers outside the newsroom and deliver them. Curating is key here, either from social networks, or from other newsrooms.

We shouldn’t be afraid to point to other competing outlets. The new app Election 2012, by New York Times, does just that. As is announced on the NYT’s website: “You literally don’t have to go anywhere else for your political news”. If you’re delivering a good second screen experience, audiences you point to other websites will return to your specially designed page because you’ll be their provider of everything they need from their second screen.

“A rule says, ‘we must do it this way’. A principle says ‘this works and has through all remembered time’. The difference is crucial.”

Robert McKee in ‘Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting’

It is, indeed, a crucial difference and I believe that we, inside newsrooms, need less rules and more principles. Robert Mckee defends, on the above quotation, that humankind knows, and has known for a long time, that certain storytelling ‘forms’ really work, in terms of engaging its audience. This ‘forms’ have been around us since Aristotle wrote ‘The Poetics’.

Of course, I add, there are no ‘completly right’ selling solutions for anything, but I believe that if we want to produce content to engage our audiences – thus leading to better sales – we must follow those principles known to work in other business.

In parallel to using those principles, we must also be able to reinvent the way we do things in our newsrooms. We need a new ‘way of thinking’.

Cynthia Barton Rabe, in her book ‘The Innovation Killer’ proposes that, for innovation to flourish inside organizations, we need ‘zero-gravity thinkers’. Innovators “who are not weighed down by the expertise of a team, its politics, or ‘the way things have always been done.’ ”

With this in mind, I defend that the best way to start producing new narratives for digital distribution is through the full integration of the teams working in our newsrooms. It is only through the interchange of ideas and expertise from different ‘editorial areas’ that we can innovate our storytelling.

Our ‘zero-gravity thinkers’ must be the writers, but also the photographers, the designers, the infographists, the video editors, etc, in our workforce. All of them bringing new insights and experiences to a story.

Integration of the newsroom means that we ‘sit at the same table’ editorial elements from different intake and output sections. It is not about tearing down physical walls inside newsrooms. It’s about bringing together, to the planning of each story, all of the team’s elements that will have something to do with the production of that story.

Again, the difference is crucial.

To produce innovative storytelling we need to change the planning of those stories and we do that by introducing ‘zero-gravity thinkers’ to the discussion. Only when a story is being planned and discussed, long before intake team members go ‘out into the street’ to collect content material, can we change the way we produce and present that story. Through expertise inputs from all the members, new and different editorial approaches will arise.

Furthermore, we have another crucial principle to consider, the ‘digital first’ approach.

I believe this ‘digital first’ approach is no longer about breaking news online/mobile and following it up on print/tablet. Today, what is important about ‘digital first’ is that, in order for our intake team to collect all the needed material for the different outputs of a story, they need to think and plan the narratives with the knowledge that it will be the digitally distributed version of the story that will use the most different multimedia assets.

As stated before, we can only do that by planning, beforehand, our stories with all the people involved on the process of producing it.

This is where the ‘digital first’ approach and newsroom integration will merge. And both practices are crucial for publishing new digital narratives.

I mentioned before Robert McKee and the knowledge of a storytelling form that “works and has through all remembered time”. This form of storytelling is based on the principle of the narrative arch and as been used across such different media as theater, movies, novels and non-fiction. It as also been used for journalistic writing (narrative nonfiction). I defend it is one of the best principles to apply for the backbone of narratives for digital distribution. Let’s analize this form of storytelling.

“If you want to write successful narrative, half the battle is knowing what you’re looking for. A sharp eye for story comes from understanding that its basic ingredients are universal and learning how to spot them in the real world.”

Jack Hart in ‘Storycraft: The Complete Guide to Writing Narrative Nonfiction’

Ever since New Journalism, we have read some stories that follow the nonfiction narrative approach. As one can read in Jack Hart’s great book, ‘Storycraft’, this same form has been used in some of the best stories in New Yorker’s magazine and in some book length narratives, such as Mary Roach ‘Stiff’, or Erik Larson’s ‘Devil in the White City’, both of them blockbusters.

Jack Hart tell us, “Successful nonfiction storytelling requires a basic understanding of fundamental story theory and the story structures the theory suggests. Ignore them, and you’ll fight a losing battle with human nature. Master them, and you’re on your way to reaching a large and enthusiastic audience in just about any medium.”

He goes into great length to teach, step by step, how to write such nonfiction narratives. I advise everyone that wishes to ‘step in’ on new ways of telling their stories to buy his book. It focus on character, plot, point of view, etc; and it also teaches through examination of some published, award winning, examples.

Regarding narratives for digital distribution, Jack Hart shares on his book another great piece of information, or tool, and I’m going to borrow it from him: the narrative arch for nonfiction stories.

When starting to plan a narrative for digital distribution, on the newsroom, the ‘integrated team’ must plan the various multimedia assets of the story. They do this by using the narrative arch tool.

The writer should layout such an arch for her story, making sure to present the character – this is done on the EXPOSITION phase of the story arch – ; the various plot points that make the RISING ACTION of the arch; the CRISIS; the CLIMAX and the FALLING ACTION (the fastest ‘part’ of the story).

Once the narrative arch is drafted, all of the teams’ expertise comes into action, delivering ideas on how to best produce and present each of the plot points and major parts of the narrative.

At this part of the planning, I fully advise you to draw a storyboard for the layout of the digital narrative. The website Knight Digital Media Center has a great article about storyboards and I advise you to read and bookmark it for further consulting.

There’s an important point in the planning phase of the story that I want to emphasize.

Since most of our stories are produced to be published across various platforms (online, mobile, tablet, print, etc), you might want to draft the narrative arch as ‘transparent’ as possible. What this means is that one narrative arch must work for the story, regardless of the medium used to publish it.

Just as ‘digital first’ means that we plan the story with all of the different multimedia assets in mind, it is as important to understand that the backbone of most of our digital narratives is still going to be text.

Acknowledging this principle will make our planning much easier.

On the creative ‘zero-gravity thinkers’ meeting, some of the print planed text can be substituted by audio, or video, or whatever digital multimedia asset best serves the storytelling.

Please note that I say we must SUBSTITUTE text. I don’t say that we ADD multimedia to it. There’s no bigger mistake than publishing redundancies when making a digital narrative by using different multimedia assets that tell your audiences the same bit of the story. Imagine having one video and acompaning the text describing what you’re seeing on the video.

What is essential to produce narratives for digital distribution is the planning beforehand, with all the editorial different expertise sitting at the same table (digital first + integration).

Of course, in journalism, as in life, not everything goes according to plan. Redraw the narrative arch and your storyboard as your teams go ‘out into the field’ to produce the story’s multimedia materials. Change plot points – and change also the technical approach first chosen for those plot points – whenever what you’ve planned didn’t match what you got ‘in the field’.

In the end, these are sufficiently plastic tools and practices to enable ‘in the fly’ updates.

To help the planning phase of your story and the choosing of different multimedia techniques to substitute parts of the text that makes the narrative arch, the International Journalists’ Network website has this great article with some tips on what are the ‘strong points’ of each multimedia asset. Mark Gould, on his website Mark Gould Media, also has a very nice summary of the different multimedia techniques and what they should be best used for. To end, there’s also this ‘Cheat Sheet for Multimedia Story Decisions’ post on Mindy McAdams’ blog.

The last key point in producing narratives for digital distribution is the need of a digital editor working in the newsroom. She is the ‘maestro’ in the teams’ ‘orchestra’, that will make sure all the ‘instruments’ play smoothly and as best as they can, to deliver the best digital ‘symphonic’ storytelling to the audience.

Just as you need editors on print and on the website of your publication, you’ll also need someone who understands new digital narratives and is able to ensure all of the newsroom multimedia expertise to be bundled into the best output product possible.

Follow this principles, keeping an open mind in the newsroom so these principles don’t become rules. Don’t be afraid to fail as you try different solutions. Change the way you do your storytelling. Nourish innovation and new ideas.

Or as William C. Taylor, author of the book ‘Mavericks at Work’, posted on an Havard Business Review blog article about innovation:

“You can’t let what you know limit what you can imagine. As you try to do something special, exciting, important in your work, as you work hard to devise creative solutions to stubborn problems, don’t just look to other organizations in your field (or to your past successes) for ideas and practices. Look to great organizations in all sorts of unrelated fields to see what works for them — and how you can apply their ideas to your problems. Who are the most unlikely organizations from which you learn? Do you have new ideas about where to look for new ideas?”

Please let me know your thoughts and ideas on the comments bellow. I would love to ear from you.

Adam Thomas, Sourcefabric Communications Manager was kind enough to reply and asked me what where my thoughts about an editorial system and the way it could help with the future of digital storytelling (regarding my article on the subject). In reply to his challenge, I decided to write an article for this blog. Adam agreed with my approach.

The most important aspect of a digital narrative is the amount of different multimedia assets that can be used to build a story. With these different assets, the need for full collaboration between different professionals within a newsroom is born. Any editorial system that aims to enable digital storytelling must provide a complete set of tools for the collaboration of these different professionals, many of whom have not been used to work within an editorial system, until now. More on this later on.

Another major aspect on today’s digital panorama is the publishing tools available. For print and web it is a fairly straightforward aspect, but for mobile and tablet publishing, things tend to be a little more complicated. Indie publishers are in urgent need for a solution (easy and inexpensive) that enables them to publish across these platforms. For the sake of this article I will focus on native applications as the needed solution.

Editorial systems can work with publishing tools, like Adobe’s Indesign and Incopy, or can have their own built-in tools. To tackle the problem mentioned before, that of being able to publish to various mobile and tablet platforms, it would be really nice if Sourcefabric where to develop Superdesk with a mobile and tablet publishing solution built in.

The way I see it working would be through the developing of various native reader applications for the different operating systems. These applications would offer costumers a simple customization solution but, apart from that, their backbone would be the same: a store function for buying issues, a library function for archiving those issues and a reader function to read the issues (on and off line). The various platforms would be iOS for Apple’s devices, Android for Google’s operative system based devices and Adobe’s AIR readers for desktops. Sourcefabric would provide the hosting of the different issues of each publication.

All of these different readers would process issues published with Superdesk, in HTML, thus allowing publishing for web browsers to be the same as for mobile and tablet devices, if publishers choose to do so. More, an HTML based solution would allow for integration with various widgets and API that are being used across the web right now. Finally, an HTML based solution should be made using responsive design principles allowing the same published content to be accessed on a myriad of different screen sizes.

Back to the functions of Superdesk for digital narratives, now that we’ve put aside the problem of how and what to publish for mobile and tablets.

For delivering truly digital narratives, newsrooms must become fully integrated and the editorial system must reflect this. As with an orchestra, digital narratives need a conductor to deliver the best ‘music’ to the audience. This conductor, or narratives editors, must be able, through the editorial system, to built the different stories, using all the above mentioned multimedia assets, without ruining the material needed for other publishing solutions, like print or web.

Allow me to further explain this point with an example: Imagine a story for a magazine. It’s main story will be told using text – actually, text must be regarded as the backbone storytelling tool for most of today’s news media publishers. When designing the digital narrative, some parts of this text can be swapped for multimedia assets, like video or audio slideshows. The digital narrative conductor must be able to perform those changes within the editorial system without ruining the print edition text.
So, an editorial system that enables digital narratives must be able to run parallel version of each story, one for each publishing medium.

When we consider all the different multimedia assets that can be produced for digital narratives (like video, interactive infographics, photos slideshows – with or without audio, etc) we can easily think of various software tools to produce all of these assets. If we want to find a common denominator for all of these multimedia assets it should be that, most of it can be built or exported as HTML. Therefor, an editorial system must give the possibility to add ‘bits’ of HTML embedded within the text main body. These HTML assets are to be uploaded, by various team members, on an shared article folder in the server.
It doesn’t make sense to have multimedia libraries for all the content inside an editorial system; it’s much better to have articles placed inside an individual folder with all the different multimedia assets that go into the making of that article.

Another multiformat tool that is most needed, because of all the different formats that can be used to record video, or pictures, is that of a ‘hidden’ translator that will re-save every multimedia asset to a supported format, taking into account the various platforms where those assets will be used.
For each of the above mentioned parallel versions of a story, only the ‘right’ formats and assets should be displayed.
For example, a story that has text, video, pictures and an HTML asset on it’s folder, would only display the text and pictures (CMYK version in 300 dpi resolution) on the ‘print version’ inside the editorial system. Likewise, the same story for digital publishing would display the text, the video, the HTML asset and the pictures (RGB version in 175 dpi resolution).

One multimedia tool that would be very welcomed inside a multiplatform editorial system, is that of a photo slideshow tool. This is the easiest multimedia asset that can be created by non-visual professionals. Most of the times these days, someone else on the newsroom must do the ‘montage’ work. This workflow ’duplication’ could be very easy to bypass through a simple tool built in the editorial system. It is of the most importance that this tool would allow adding sound to a slideshow, thus making it a powerful storytelling tool: the audio slideshow, perfect for really engaging plot points of a story.

Another important aspect of a digital narrative ready editorial system is that today’s journalists can record different bits of a story using their mobile devices. Superdesk should work to integrate it’s system with various mobile applications that are used to record different multimedia assets, like video and photography applications, or audio recording ones. Evernote and Dropbox are also two very usable digital services that could help the journalists, on the road, working with Superdesk. Finally, we can not forget about mobile email, calendar and other useful productivity tools: integration with these kind of apps can allow for huge improvements in workflow, be it when reporting, or when managing the publication with Superdesk.

As with any editorial system, workflow management and task assignments are of the most importance for building digital storytelling. The more multimedia assets are required for a story, the more different technicians are needed to collaborate, in an orderly and engaged manner, in that story. Editors and coordinators must be able to assign production roles and tasks for each article and be able to check on the progress of the work being done in each story.

In the end, I’m really looking forward to Sourcefabric’s solution. From what I’ve learnt it looks very promising. And with Christmas around the corner, who knows, my wish list just might be heard.

Please let me know in this article’s comments what other ideas you might have.

It is unquestionable that our species needs to tell and listen to stories, be it fiction or real stories. We have been doing it since the beginning of times. Some argue that our storytelling needs are commanded by the social ambient we live in. Mr. Boyd goes to great length on his book to show that stories and humans have more to do with our species cognition and evolution, than to the social ambients we live in.

In no way do I intend for this simple, small article, to substitute reading Mr. Boyd’s book. Actually, I urge everyone who has a minimal interest on storytelling to do so.

So, why do we need to tell and listen to stories?

First of all, we have to acknowledge the obvious principle that humans are a social species. This means that we must live within a society to survive and evolute. Such is the case of other species like wolfs, bees, flamingos, etc.

Living in organized societies does post a problem for it’s habitants; evolution is ‘jealous’ by nature (ah, easy play of words, sorry!!) since our genes must fight to survive and pass on to future generations. On the other hand, living in societies means that we must help others in order to survive ourselves.

One of the ultimate goals for members of a society is to aquire important information, allowing for better integration within the group (for example, knowing who’s the alpha of the group) and also status, to move upwards on the power steps of the community (augmenting one’s hypothesis for both survival and our genes perpetuation).

Another important survival fact, this time about mammals in general, is that as an intelligent species, one that also depends a great deal on exploring, many mammals need the ability to act when presented with new scenarios. Most animals achieve the ability to deal with such problems through play, as so do we humans. But our species is even more complex and play alone doesn’t fulfill the needs. This is one of the answers for stories. Mr. Boyd explains:

“Old and new stories and characters open up and populate possibility space. All these fictions make us the one species not restricted to the here and now, even if that must be where we act and feel and imagine.” Mr. Boyd continues: “(…) we have evolved to engage in art and storytelling because of the survival advantages they offer our species.”

This need for art and storytelling as a survival tool made human’s “prefrontal cortex – the part of the human brain that has expanded most dramatically over the last three million years, and the part that makes abstract reasoning possible – suppressing immediate natural responses for the sake of long-term strategic”.

As we’ve seen so far, humans evolved in order to be able to create both art (fiction) and storytelling as a form of survival. We’ve also seen that, within a society, humans long for information and status has another important factor for both survival and perpetuation of one’s genes. Let’s focus deeper on these two points, again with the invaluable help of Mr. Boyd’s book.

The need for information is almost a non-brainer, once we acknowledge human’s need to live within a society. Nevertheless, more in depth information (ah, ah) is helpful to understand human’s vital need for stories. Again, Mr. Boyd is here to help us: “Narrative can offer us either particular social information to guide immediate decisions or general principles we can apply in the future”. Furthermore, “Minds generate future: they guide action by trying to predict what will follow”, “We therefore listen eagerly to those with strategic information they think we will value.”

Within a society, the higher we are on the power stair (status) the better chances we have to survive and for our genes to perpetuate. Since humans have the need for information as a tool of survival, those who posses that information and share it, using storytelling, will be on a better position to achieve status within the group. As Mr. Boyd tells us: “Art entices us to engage our attention and activate our minds in ways that we find most pleasing, and allows the most gifted individuals to earn status by their power to command the attention of others”.

To achieve that status, the storyteller must solve some problems: “Character and plot are from one angle problems that all storytellers must solve to hold an audience, (…)”, “(…) audiences always ready to redirect their minds to their own concerns should an author’s grip on their attention weaken.”

In the end, Mr. Boyd tells us: “(…) the chief functions of art and story lie in improving human cognition, cooperation and creativity.”

Brian Boyd’s “On the Origin of Stories” looks mostly into fiction storytelling, going to great length to study Homer’s “The Odyssey” and Dr. Seuss “Horton Hears a Who!”. Nevertheless, it is my understanding that most of what is told on his book applies to non-fiction. Even more so when thinking on long format modern narratives, like Jack Hart describes on his amazing new book “Storycraft” (More about this masterpiece on a article to be written in the near future! I promise.)

But how does all of this relates to narratives for digital distribution? Let’s take a final look at Mr. Boyd’s book. As stated above, Brian Boyd analyzes Homer’s “The Odyssey” as a great example of storytelling (and it is!). He tells us that Homer used the best available technology to tell his audience the story of Ulysses, through the theater, with a poet/singer delivering it to the audience.

Being such a powerful narrative, it is no surprise that “The Odyssey” was printed as a book, once again using the best available technology for broadcasting Homer’s classic: Gutenberg’s invention of movable type and the mass printing of books.

So, if we understand, beyond doubt, the need humans have to both deliver and consume stories, why should we not rethink how to deliver them, the best way we can, using the latest technology? “The Odyssey” started as a epic poem for oral distribution and evolved into a book, for paper distribution. It was also adapted to the TV screen, for comics books, etc.

I leave you with one last quote from Brian Boyd’s book to help this line of thinking: “In each new work they (the storytellers) will seek to raise the benefit – the attention – earning power of their compositional efforts and lower their composition costs, through recombining existing solutions in new ways, while also raising the benefits and lowering their audience’s costs in time and effort.”

I’ve reviewed the Biblion application for the Talking New Media website and, since I was so blown away by it I asked Phillip for a interview. He was so kind to find the time to answer my question and fill this post with an amazing amount of useful information for anyone that wants to ‘pick’ inside one of the most innovative editorial applications out there.

Digital Distribution: This is clearly a new approach on editorial content applications. Please tell us a bit about the project and the briefing you had from NY Library.

Phillip Tiongson: NYPL came to us with a challenge, how can a Library lead the future of reading? The Library traditionally has a role of collection and storage, but with digital technology, they can lead the charge in making their incredible collections accessible in a revolutionary way. Biblion in its print form was a scholarly publication circulated in the 90s to a select set of other research institutions. From the beginning, the digital edition of Biblion was targeted towards a wider audience, to provide inspiration for new scholars, and to show the relevance of the Libary’s holdings to today’s audiences.

DD: Each time a user launches the Biblion app, she gets a different photo cover with titles on both sides: one side for what has been read and the right side for articles that should be read. How did you got this idea and what’s your intention for this solution?

PT: From the first moment you launch Biblion, we wanted to take advantage of its digital nature, that unlike a print magazine, it can have a different cover each time. We wanted to show how the information that is first presented to you can be customized, to direct you to new stories you may have not read, and to show you a dynamic list of your reading history. We wanted you to feel like there is a surprise every time you launch Biblion, unlike most iPad magazines, where the cover image is either a movie or a still image that never changes.

DD: The amount of content on this application is impressive. Can you let us know how this content influenced on the UI design?

PT: The content (and the ideas for future editions) completely drove the form of the UI. Our idea was to give the content from the collection its shape BACK. When you go into the Library, and look at the books or the stacks, you immediately get a sense of the content that you might find inside a book, whether it is a short pamphlet or an encyclopedia. In their digital forms, they might both be represented by an icon, that gives them equal weight. We wanted to create a way for the content of each edition to create its own shape. When launching Biblion: World’s Fair, you see a set of 5 stacks, with content piled up behind, to show the five major themes of this collection. In the future, when new editions are created, you should see a variety of different shapes created by the different content contained in those editions. In face, each set of content will form its own unique visual fingerprint, based on the actual content of the edition.

DD: Biblion has two different “table of contents”, each one with its own visual identity. One for chapters and another for articles. Why have you choosen this solution?

PT: We wanted to provide users with many different entry points, so that visitors have several ways to gain intuition about the content contained within the digital space. The Exhibition Wall provides a visual space to explore the key images of the stories, while the Stack View provides a peek into the length and content contained within each story.

DD: The articles TOC is circular, without end. Why did you chose to design it like this?

PT: Unlike a book, a digital space does not have a natural beginning and end. We tried to take advantage of the properties of the digital medium as much as possible.

DD: Reading articles with the iPad on horizontal and vertical mode allows for different reading experiences (with the same content, of course). Can you tell us more about these differences?

PT: In many iPad publications, the horizontal reading mode is the same as the vertical one, with a simple change in formatting. When you are trying to recreate a magazine layout, this works well and seamlessly, but we wanted to take advantage of the fact that the reader may want to do two different activities, and optimize the display for each orientation. In Gallery View (landscape), we provide the visitor with a gallery view, full screen, dark background, of the incredible images stored in the collection. In Book View (portrait), we present the text front and center, and provide a more comfortable iPad reading experience with black text on a white background. Each view is optimized for a different activity, rather than simply reformatting the content.

DD: The visual coding for each article (the thumbnails with color coding for pictures, videos, etc) works very well. How did you come up with this solution and why?

PT: The visual coding was driven by the notion to give users entry points into the vast amount of content stores in Biblion. By indicating where featured images are, or archival documents, or video, users might visually search for a video to watch, or be in the mood for looking at documents, and be able to instinctually find stories that contain them. The color coding gives meaningful texture to the visual space, helping to show what things are, and point your attention towards them.

DD: Some articles have related content within Biblion, but you can only see this on vertical mode. Why did you chose this?

PT: Actually, this is something we wanted to address, and in version 1.5 (which will be coming out soon), we reveal connections in landscape mode as well.

DD: There are so many great ideas on this application. One that I love is on the vertical mode articles: when scrolling through the text, the subtitles remain on top until the next one scrolls in. This kind of content detail attention is great. What do you think other developers, app designers can learn from Biblion and your work?

PT: We wanted to push the envelope for what a reading experience can be on the iPad. Almost every iPad application currently available tries to replicate a physical publication. Most iPad magazines are formatted almost exactly like their print counterparts, and inherit many traits from what I call their Analog Heritage. They have a long history of expectations to fill, and advertisers to support, and so they are designed in a way to make their readers and advertisers the most comfortable. However the iPad is not printed paper, and I think that designers have so many opportunities to show new ways that it can be used, in ways that exceed the usefulness of a printed page. That is the challenge.

DD: The question I believe is on everybody’s head. The Atlantic Magazine posted a article stating that every magazine publisher should learn from your application. Are you planning on realizing a iPad publishing tool, based on Biblion, that allows other publishers to use the developed UI?

PT: We have had lots of inquiries, so who knows? I can tell you that we have already been talking with NYPL about the next issue of Biblion, and that its success has really brought a lot of attention to the NYPL.

DD: Regarding the editorial iPad applications panorama, what are the examples that inspire you?

PT: Eureka, the Times magazine is a great publication, both in terns of content and form. They are one of the few apps that use rotation for different purposes, like Biblion does. Our Choice by Al Gore is also a great publication, almost in that they took the completely opposite approach from Biblion. While Biblion strives to be multilinear and to show many different entry points, Our Choice is hyper-linear, every piece of content is laid out in an iMovie like timeline. But it is executed with Apple-like precision.

DD: It is my belief that the iPad app platform is lacking the presence of more indie publishers. What are your thoughts on this?

PT: I agree. I hope that more indie publishers will take the leap into the iPad, they may be surprised by the audiences they find.

DD: What is your advise for readers that want to try publishing on the iPad?

PT: Right now, there are not too many publishing platforms, per se, so to try publishing you really need to find an independent designer and developer who you can work with to create an app. The iOS platform is still very technical, so you need someone you can trust to express your vision in an interactive way.

DD: Thank you so much guys! Congratulations on the amazing work on Biblion. Any last thoughts you want to share with us?

PT: Thanks for the thoughtful questions. Biblion had over 100,000 downloads in the first three weeks, and still growing everyday. We would love for your readers to help get the application onto as many iPads as we can! The best part is that it is amazingly, totally free. So spread the word, and if you like what you see and want to see more, donate to the NYPL using the link in the app. That will allow us to do even more in the next edition.

The way we tell stories in the print media has been, mostly, the same for some time now. Space constraints and graphic layout have made the narrative flow a broken one. With the advent of digital devices and rich new ways of shaping content, it is time to rethink how we produce and present our stories.

With this article I want to explain why the broken narrative experience happens and how we can find ways to prevent it on digital publishing. Furthermore, I will propose a way of planning, producing and designing narratives that won’t suffer from this problem. In the end, I’ll take a fictional story and share how I would plan it, from production to presentation, using the ideas proposed on this article.

For this article I will refer to linear narrative – that with a beginning, middle and an end. Think of it has going to the theater to watch a movie. You go into the room and the movie starts. You can be watching Memento, a traditional non-liner screenplay. The movie goes forward and backward in time. But as a part of the audience when you experience the going to the theater to see Memento, you’ll be in a linear narrative: you go, you watch the movie (regardless of it’s timeline narrative), the movie ends, you get out of the theater and your linear experience ends. You went to the theater and watched a story, without interruption, regardless of how the story was told.

Likewise, when describing non-linear narratives, I will not be focusing on their timeline, but on interruptions of the narrative itself. Like going to the movies to watch Memento – and being interrupted in the middle by a documentary about the film itself, and then having the main film start again where it was interrupted. You went to the theater to watch a story, but the experience was interrupted by another story, regardless of the way both stories connected.

Let me start with a simple story. Think about a lecturer who may have inspired you – if you can’t remember one, I advise you to visit TED’s website, where you will find amazing people, with amazing ideas, telling amazing stories.

OK, now that you have a lecture as an example, let’s analyze it. What makes it such a brilliant storytelling experience? Apart from the speaker’s ability to deliver a good story and from the talk’s content, a good lecture is a linear flow of information, with a beginning, middle and an end, or conclusion. That’s the basic of a story; we’ve learned how to do it from an early age.

Let’s look a little deeper. At the beginning of a talk, the speaker will tell you the subject of her story and what she will try to achieve (teach you something, share an experience with you, etc). She will then introduce the subject in small steps. Most talks these days are accompanied by visual aids – the speaker will share either the key points of her talk or some visual information to help explain the knowledge that is being shared.

From the beginning of the story, the speaker takes her audience into the talk’s theme, stopping for visual aid whenever it is needed. The audience experience is like being walked through a garden, the speaker holding each person’s hand while they stroll. At the end of the talk, with the conclusion, the audience has been told a story. Just like the ones we were told as children; just like the ones we are told everywhere, in movies, books, TV shows, by our friends at a bar or by our family, during supper, at the end of a story full day.
Now allow me to tell you yet another story. Imagine yourself in a lecture hall. The room is packed and the upcoming talk is the one you came to hear. The subject is something you are interested in, and the speaker is the best in the field.

The light goes out, the audience is quiet except for a cough here, another there. The speaker takes the stage with an ovation. This is the talk everybody has been waiting for!

The talk starts with an introduction about the subject. The speaker is taking the audience by the hand, strolling around. All of the sudden, in the middle of a sentence – “and so we can conclude that…” – the speaker stops. She then says “you know what? I’ve just remembered that I have this amazing picture, somewhere on my computer that relates to this subject.” She finds the picture and displays it for the audience. It does make sense and the picture has added another layer of information. But then, after the picture is shown, the speaker starts talking again, right where she stopped the sentence before – (“and so we can conclude that…”) “subject A will give us a light about subject B…”

Now imagine that this talk, the one you and the rest of the room were really looking forward to,  keeps having such interruptions. The speaker will keep ‘throwing’ stuff that relates to the subject, to the story being told, but with no regard for the interruptions.

The storytelling would be awful. The narrative would not be linear. one. It would be a mess.

Here is a graphic visualization of such a narrative:

This last example shows how we either present, or consume, news on most distribution channels right now. In print, because of physical space constraints that pages impose and the way graphic design copes with it, the presentation and consumption of a story is a non-linear narrative experience. Pictures, text, captions, etc., all relate to the story being told, but the way the bits of the story are laid out reinforces its non-linearity. Let’s look with more detail into this.

Consider the following magazine layout of a story. It has some of the content you would expect from a magazine: flowing text in columns, pictures with captions, graphics, and a ‘box’ with a related story.

Every aspect of this story is related and enhances the information being communicated. But since we are presenting all of this content on 8 pages, some compromising must be done. Graphic designers must find the best way to make this story presentable, readable and compelling. Working within the physical boundaries of pages, the text is set on columns and flows from one spread to another without much control of where it breaks from one column to the next, from one page to the next, or even from one spread to the next.

Furthermore, in order to lay out all of  a story’s elements,  designers must ensure that a graphical ‘important’ element is presented on each spread. This means that the pictures of the story will be placed on the spreads to favor visual enhancement. The same happens with the secondary story and the graphic of our example.
What does this means for the reader’s linear narrative experience?  Since every bit of the story is laid out on the spreads, pictures and other relevant information hardly ever will be presented in the best place for the storytelling experience. Readers will have to stop reading the main text to absorb the picture information, or will have to read further until finding a ‘safe’ place to stop reading the main text and thereafter read the secondary story, etc.

The narrative is a broken one, and representing it in a graphical way would resemble much the previous representation of the bad talk example.

On most websites, sadly, the same non-linear experience obtains. They present stories using a top picture and a scroll-down text column. If the story has secondary pictures and texts, these items are presented alongside the long column of text or, in the case of secondary pictures, by making the top picture a slideshow.

Even on publications on the iPad, the same way of presenting a story remains. Most publishers approach tablet publishing using either a print or a web paradigm.

Let’s go back to the first example, the good linear narrative of the first talk. Here is a graphical visualization of it:

In a good storytelling experience, a linear one, each item that exists to aid the main story is placed in an exact location. For example, imagine a story about a family facing economic stress. Suppose there is a video of a family member talking about how having been fired made things worse. In a linear narrative experience, the video would only be presented to the audience at a certain point of the main narrative. When telling about how the family was facing stressful problems, not only because of their savings losses, but also because of someone having been fire – that would be the place to show the video. Think about it as a lecture: “Let’s see a video on why losing her job only made things get worse.”

With a lecture as an example, you’ll see that the main story is a string of episodes, like a TV series, where every added item is placed either at the beginning or the end of each episode. Every episode is set so that it can be interrupted without breaking the narrative thread.  Let’s use the TV series analogy to further discuss a linear narrative approach.

If you plan your story as a TV series, you’ll have to break it in blocks on a weekly basis. With the story broken into episodes, you can then use the ‘intervals’ in between to place your added material. Since you don’t have to observe a 30-minute rule for each episode, you can break the blocks to have the intervals where you want them – where it makes perfect sense to add the story-enhancing bits. There are some clever solutions, in the real TV world, to cope with the temporal ‘amnesia’ that audiences face on consuming a story in blocks, each block one week after the previous one. Some TV series use the ‘previously on XXX’ solution, others broadcast the last seconds of the previous episode, etc. You can use these solutions to create a linear flow, once you’ve used the ‘spaces’ between them for added material.

So far, we’ve seen that most of the stories we consume are presented in a linear form, regardless of the timeline used for presenting the storytelling. In news publishing, because of physical space of the page, the narrative offered is not a linear one. We looked at a successful example of storytelling, the lecture, and learned why it really works for distributing a story. Then, using a TV series season analogy, we were able to see how breaking a narrative in blocks created ‘spaces’ for added material to enhance our storytelling. Let us now see how we can do this on a digital distributing device.

First, allow me to share the reasons why I think that all of this is important. With the iPad, for the first time publishers had a device where they could control the digital side of their business. Also of great importance, the iPad allowed publishers to control the design of their digital editions (in opposition to the Web where graphic designers aren’t as able to ‘free design’ stories). Unfortunately, until now, the approach taken by publishers on the tablet has been mostly based on their print editions. Thus, their stories, when published in digital versions, are still non-linear narratives. Not only this doesn’t make any sense, it goes against what a digital audience is expecting from a digital publication on a digital device. Many readers complain about their need for ‘immersion’ not being fully fulfilled. Taking a linear narrative approach for planning, producing and presenting content on digital editions can correct this.

It is really goes without saying that the most important aspect of a story is the subject of that story, the content. It follows that if we want to change the way we tell our stories, we’ll have to start with that basic concept. Every storyteller must first come up with the content. She then will be able to break the story into blocks, or episodes of content – not only for the main narrative, but also for the added material. For each episode, the storyteller must decide on the best technique to communicate her story. In a digital narrative, storytellers aren’t obligated to choose text over audio, or pictures over video. They must choose the best way to communicate each bit, each episode. The choice should flow from the content itself. Added material for a story must be presented in a way that can either be fully explored by a reader, or moved forward, without loss for the narrative experience.

The final linear narrative will be a flow of content, presented using every digital tool available (such as video, audio, pictures, interactive graphics or text). Using a TV series season approach, the storyteller will present her story, one episode after another, in a way that will not break the flow of the narrative, regardless of the technique used for each episode. Each part will be placed after the previous one, in an exact point of the story in order to maintain the flow. Intervals will be used for added material. Readers will be able to choose the amount of time they take to consume each episode of the narrative.

Let me finish this article with yet another example. Imagine the previous story about the family facing serious economical problems. For this article, as the storyteller, I plan to have the main story based on the family experience: how they got there, how they are coping with it and what are their plans to improve their life. To add to the main story, I plan to have an explanation about the financial crisis, some advice from a family economics expert, and a set of solutions available to families facing the same problems. My family is composed of a working mother, a recently unemployed father and two children, both attending school. I will break my story in episodes and use the intervals for the added material.

In the first episode of the narrative I will be presenting the family and describing how they got into this mess. To do this I will need to interview the family members, recording everything in audio. A photographer will take pictures of them, their house and some of their daily routine. He will also record some of our conversations on video. Since this is a very powerful personal story, I would like to begin presenting it using some strong pictures in a slideshow and one recorded sentence to set the mood. Something like a picture of the whole family and then a close up of the mother with a bit of her audio stating, “I never thought we would be like this”.  Then I’ll use a strong picture for my title and lead, as I would in a print magazine. For this strong story about human suffering, I will use text as the main way to present the story, refraining from over-exposing the family members on their suffering. The first episode will end by stating that this family is just an example of thousands like them, victims of the economic crises.

I’ll use this first interval to show an interactive infographics that explains the financial crisis. Readers for whom this is old hat can skip to the next episode. On the other hand, anyone who wants to learn about the crises can explore this tool to fully understand the problem.

My second episode will tell the story of how the family is coping with their reality. It will need  pictures of the mother working, of the children going to school and of the unemployed father. Again, I’ll use a mix of audio, some video here and there, but mostly text. The second episode will end with the mother letting us know about some of what the family does to make each day as normal as possible.

This second interval will allow me to present the added material about the solutions available for families facing the same problems. This set of information can vary from tuition solutions for keeping children in school, to information about soup kitchens across the country. I will present it in text, based on a list of topics, with a link to move forward, for readers who do not want e this information.

My third and final episode will be about the plans the family makes to change their fate. Since I want to finish my story on a positive note, I will focus more on audio and video for this episode. I’ll have to break this last episode in two, since I still need a space for my last added material with the expert on family economics. Taking some movies as an example, I’ll use the final section of the third episode to do a follow-up on the family a couple of weeks after my time spent with them. Hopefully I’ll have some good news, like the father finding a new job, but any follow-up will do to end my story.

For the added material with the specialist I’ll use a great solution used on LaInformation website. I’ll record a different video of the specialist for each of her solutions. I’ll present the content with a picture of the specialist and a set of buttons, each for each solution that will fire the video with the recorded material.

On a final note, for each episode I’ll be using the episode technique, since I want to integrate text with pictures and want the narrative to flow. In the end, each episode can be broken into multiple smaller episodes in order to achieve a perfect flow of the linear narrative.

To sum up, we need to radically change the way we tell our stories. With the advent of new solutions to distribute our content, mostly by digital distribution, we must find and use new solutions for our storytelling. It doesn’t make sense to keep using old paradigms on new devices. Our main goal is to learn the best way to tell a story and stop using techniques that worked only for one support (be it text and pictures on print, video on TV or audio on radio). With digital distribution we can mix all these techniques in a way that enables our storytelling. We also need to change, inside newsrooms, the way we plan, produce and present our stories. I hope that this article will help you to find better solutions than the ones presented by me.

Note: I would like to thank Barry Sussman for his kindness and help in editing this article into something readable. I would also like to thank Vasco Ferreira for his ‘lecture’ insight and Joana Maciel for all her help with the planning and writing of this article.

A previous word, when I started Digital Distribution I made a rule for myself that I would not do reviews of apps. Nevertheless, sometimes something comes around that is so important that gives me the excuse to break my own rules. The launch of Hype is such an important affair I think and so, I am more than happy to break the rules and write about this piece of software. 
The team behind Hype is Tumult Inc., a small company funded by Y Combinator (check this website for some sweet startup funding). Both founders of Tumult Inc. have worked previously on Apple. They are Jonathan Deutsch and Ryan Nielsen. I was lucky enough for Jonathan to find some time to answer some questions about Hype. You can read the short interview at the end of this article.

Presentations made, let’s get to it!

Hype is a Mac OS only simple software that allows users to make HTML5 animations and simple interactions without the need to write HTML code. Aimed (from the gallery examples, at least) specially for making simple websites, this software looks more like Flash Catalyst than like Flash Professional. And that is just fine because most interactive graphics can be done using Hype’s tool.

Within the software, you can create different scenes (think of it as different pages on a website) and different timelines. Hype offers the possibility for you to create buttons that navigate among the different scenes (with or without predefined transitions). Buttons can also trigger the launch of additional timelines.

What does this mean? For creating interactive graphics, you can set several pages and some navigation buttons to move forward and backward (use this for simple step-by-step storytelling, for example). If, on a certain page, you need a button to trigger an animation (for example, the flying route of a plane), you can use Hype’s action to launch a timeline (the timeline that has the plane’s flying route).
In Flash Professional terms this is like having the main timeline, with scenes stopped and navigated by buttons. On a given scene, if you want to launch something, you would use a moviecplip and a button to play it, that is what the different timelines on Hype can do.
Now think about most of the interactive graphics used on newspapers websites (or done by you). With this two simple tasks you can do a lot!
Of course, Hype is capable of much more. For example, doing an animation of an object, from one place to another, is really simple with the use of a record button on the software interface. The ‘programing’ of buttons and interactions is all done on a simple, well designed tool panel.

On Hype’s website there are two tutorial videos (one for Getting Started and another for Animations) and a small but effective Documentation section with some help for using the software. One main asset of Hype is this, it is so simple that after watching both videos I was able to start doing a simple interactive web element and the only two doubts I found when doing it where answered on the Documentation page. It’s that simple!
Now, imagine you wanted an automated slideshow for your iPad application (or website). There is a huge amount of software being sold out there to do this (I know, I’ve been looking around, because I wanted to use slideshows on my iPad applications). I did a five photos slideshow using Hype in a couple of minutes. Then I kept using Hype to make the previous mentioned interactive web element.
Testing everything I did on one of my browser was as simples as pushing one button. One new tab opens on my default Web browser and I can see and interact with my ongoing design. After making your stuff with Hype, exporting it to use on whatever you want is also very simple. Hype gives you the ability to export all the used assets onto a folder.

But I wanted to test it on the iPad. I am using Woodwing’s Digital Magazine solution for publishing some titles on the device. This publishing platform allows me to use web elements made with HTML and Java, widgets, and place them on a InDesign page. I then export the document and, if I want to test it on a real iPad (opposed to using Apple iPhone simulator), I upload the exported stuff to a delivery web server. It works fine and I believe its one of the best platforms out there for publishing on tablets without having to learn and write code. But for testing what I’ve just done using Hype on the iPad was somehow too much for me. What if I needed to make some changes?
Hype has a very clever way of allowing you to test on the iPad (or other devices) ‘on the run’. The software allows you to export what you are doing into a Dropbox folder! That is just sweet.

I am designing stuff on my Mac, I then export it into my Dropbox folder. On my iPad, I access the folder, chose the .html file and open it on Safari. Since Woodwing’s solution (and also Adobe’s and Quark’s solution for publishing on the iPad) uses Safari integrated inside their apps, if it works on Safari, it will also work inside my magazines or newspapers applications. After some fine tunning I uploaded everything onto Woodwing’s delivery web server and it worked inside one of my apps!
To sum it up, this is what you need to know if you are looking for a tool that works on the iPad and allows you to do most of the interactive infographics you usually do. Hype is so simple that anyone can use it, without any knowledge of HTML coding. It has some clever features that will make your life easier. Even if it is not the perfect tool yet, from my knowledge is the best yet that I’ve found. For it’s price of $29.99, it’s really worth giving it a try.
Hype still has so much space to grow. I wanted to know more about it and what is next on the roadmap so I send a couple of questions to Jonathan. Here are his answers:

Digital Distribution: Hype is available only on the Mac App Store. Are you expecting developing a Windows version? 

Jonathan Deutsch: We have no current plans to develop a Windows version, but are gauging interest

DD: Since the launch of the iPad, publishers have been looking for a tool that enables designers to create interactive graphics. Flash has been the king for this on publishers websites. Hype is a great help towards a HTML5 tool able to replace Flash, but it still lacks some helpful tools. What are your plans for the following releases of Hype?

JD: Sorry, we don’t comment on upcoming plans!

DD: As you know, Adobe’s tools are everywhere on the newsrooms. Photoshop and Illustrator are the main tools for designing graphics on print. Do you think we can expect Hype to work with native Adobe’s files, like PSD and AI

JD: Same as above, but of course we would like Hype to integrate with widely used file formats

DD: Digital storytelling is developing rapidly, more than ever with smartphones and tablets. How do you see this evolution and what are your expectations for Hype’s place on it?

JD: We think Hype is a great tool for digital story telling!  We made it easy to craft interactive and animated content and you do not have to write any code.  This puts the power to make digital pop-up books, animated comics, and visual novels in any storyteller’s hands.  Stories made with Hype will also work across a wide range of phones/tablets, so authors can reach more readers.

DD: For every publication typefaces are a big asset regarding the title’s brand. Services like Typekit allow publishers to design their online presence using fonts that aren’t system fonts. Do you expect that Hype will be able to allow designers to have the same liberty, without having to code? 

JD: Without commenting on upcoming plans, we agree that designers need to be able to use more than the “safe web fonts” to properly express themselves or to make beautiful sites.

DD: Thank you so much guys and keep up with the great work. Any last thoughts you want to share with us?

JD: We’re just looking forward to seeing what artists, designers, and storytellers are able to come up with using Hype!

On print, graphics can be used to complement a story or can become themselves the full story. With the amount of data that is produced and published every day, data visualization is also making its way onto newsrooms around the world. To have journalists that can understand data, know how to mine it and are able to design visual solutions to present huge data sets is a must-have anywhere these days.

As any other journalistic story, when planning and designing a infographic, journalists must be sure of all the data and all the information they are using. Everybody inside the newsroom must understand and follow through that infographics are not illustrations and cannot be used as the ‘page layout saviour’. Never give up on the journalistic values of just publishing what you know.

Some of the latest examples of how visual journalism can go very wrong are all the graphics, published around the world, about Bin Laden’s death. With the lack of real information for such a big story, newsrooms felt obliged to publish something, anything! As a result we had visual journalists inventing mountains where there were none, choosing which helicopters the military used, etc… The amount of graphical fantasy that was published was amazing. So many errors where made that world known infographic’s star Alberto Cairo and Innovation’s Juan Giner wrote a statement published on Nieman Watchdog website asking to stop this madness and asking for journalists around the world to endorse it.

But, apart from this mistakes and the still persistent feeling in some newsrooms that visual information is nothing more than illustrations to go on the side of a text, infographics are becoming, more and more, an important journalistic tool. And if this is true to the print publishing, it is even more when we talk about online news publishing. By adding a layer of interactivity on top of ‘print’ graphics, journalists found a  way of engaging their readers on a story that is very rich and powerful.

These days, many news websites are doing interactive graphics and no one does it better than The New York Times. With a team of more than 30 professionals for this craft, from designers to specialists on maps or statistics, the old lady keeps showing us how to master the interactive visual journalism.

Sadly, most of the web’s interactive graphics have been done using Adobe’s Flash and neither Steve Job, nor the iPad like this tool.  For all of the online discussing last year about the web not needing Flash anymore, very few words where written about the need for it, to produce interactive infographics. The truth is that there is a real need for a tool that allows designers (not developers) to produce simple interactivity.

I’m one who believes that we need to have developers, right now, on newsrooms along side with designers and journalists. Since this is not the landscape right now, we still need a tool that enables people working on newsrooms to be able to animate their graphics.

(Note: There is such a tool, launched a couple of weeks ago. Hype will help a great deal of visual journalists around the world. I intend to write about Hype very soon on this blog. UPDATE: You can reed the article and an interview about Hype here.)

This lack of Flash on the iPad as been noticed. Most news media applications don’t have interactive graphics, even if their websites have them. Of course that, as always, there are a few examples outside the norm. For the iPad, I could not talk about interactive infographics and fail from mentioning two amazing examples: The Times and Al Gore’s Our Choice iPad applications.

Newscorp’s daily newspaper has been working with the amazing London design studio Applied Works to develop some of the best interactive graphics I’ve seen on the last years. Even more impressing, they did it for the newspaper’s iPad application. You can check some of their brilliant work here.

Another app with some amazing examples is Our Choice. The ‘green’ ebook is a must have for anyone interested on how to present data that allows interaction on the iPad. Sadly, I couldn’t find a place that could show in detail these works. You can check Push Pop’s website for some quick examples and, hopefully feel inspired enough to go to the App Store and buy the book for yourself.

Regardless of the few examples found on news media iPad applications right now, I have no doubt that interactive graphics are a major tool for journalistic storytelling on tablets and the future of publishing. With that in mind and with the knowledge that, eventually, we’ll have more and more tools allowing journalists to build such narratives (remember Hype?), I wanted to share some points that are decisive when developing interactive infographics for tablets:

a) Hotspots must be used just for three reasons: First, for navigation purposes (moving forward and backward on a simple step-by-step story). Secondly, use hotspots to add new information layers to your graphic – secondary information that is not vital to the narrative but adds to the final experience (such as the ability for readers to explore the data set and find their own stories, inside the story). Thirdly, use it to show information that, because of lack of space on the screen, you cannot display on the ‘ground’ design (of course, this is a last resort solution. I believe that if a given design isn’t working, then you should redo it, instead of compromising at the cost of your reader’s experience).

b) Remember that the iPad is not a website, therefore your application won’t probably have ‘hitable advertising’. Most websites use interactive graphics as a way to increase the number of hits on the page’s advertising. Each time you push a button, the whole page refresh and adds a new hit on the advertising.

Keep hotspots to a minimum, driven by content and not because you can do it. Most designers working on iPad applications are originally print designers and interactivity is a cool, funny new thing for them. Hence, the amount of useless hotspots that I see on my iPad is huge. Most of the times, a new designed interface would get rid of those hotspots.

Please keep in mind, just because you can do it, you don’t have to do it! Your readers will thank you.

c) Many graphics published on print are nothing more than ‘number illustrations’. Without added information, simple charts are less effective to show quantities than text. For example, which one would be clearer for you: 45% of this and 55% of that or a chart pie with those two values? (OK, I did choose two very similar values to make my point, but I believe you understand me).

A great way to add a new layer of information to your charts when publishing them on a tablet app is by adding a simple audio hotspot. Touch it and get one of the publication’s editors telling you what that given chart is and what it means for the accompanying story.

Design dissolving in behavior

Beautiful, isn’t it?

Think about it, what you design is not only transparent for the user of your object, but it also impels its user to behave with your design in a way that feels comfortable and meaningful, thus making your design dissolve. In the end, the user and the designed object interact in one intimate way.

When I think about touch interfaces, all of the above ideas make perfect sense. Sadly, when I use some of the available applications for tablets (and the iPad, these days, is still the tablet to refer to) I feel exactly the other way around.

All of us have used touch-based applications for some time now. Many of us have designed user interfaces for content on touch-based devices. Yet, there is still so much to be learned on this subject.

What I’ve learned so far

Allow me to start with a common, very used idea – it’s not print design and it’s not web design.

As much as this is a beaten sentence, an idea that sounds shallow, it has some truth inside it and we should focus, as we start, on that truth. If designing for a touch-based device is neither print or web design, than it is a ‘new’ thing. We must embrace this idea, all of us. Print and web designers must start their design thinking for these platforms with the knowledge that they don’t know everything about it. Really, we know very little about it. And that’s a very nice place to start!

So, what do we know about tablets? A couple of very important stuff actually. Taking the iPad as the reference let me share some of my thoughts about the device:

• For reading, writing and interacting with it, on the lean back position it ‘asks’ of its users, the iPad is best handled horizontally.
• As amazingly light as the device is, after spending a couple of hours holding it, your arms get tired.
• With the last point in mind, because it is a touch-based device, the way you interact with it is done with, at least, one hand. This leads to the conclusion that, whenever you interact with it you’ll be holding it mostly with one hand.
• The users hand, when touching the screen, will always cover a significant part of it.
• The finger is a much larger and clumsier pointer for interaction when compared with a mouse pointer.
• The thumbs are the user’s best friends for touch-based interactions.

With this kind of information (and there is a lot more you can get just by observing users and thinking about this subject) we can start to see some solutions for designing a friendly user interface for tablets.

For example, I can understand that whenever I ask a user to move his hand from holding the tablet position onto the screen to interact with the interface, it will affect the holding hand left on the device – by placing more weight on it.

If I cross that kind of behavior with small hotspots on my interface, I might be asking for the user to keep holding the device with just one hand for more time – since a smaller hotspot will be harder to hit and might lead to several tries until it is hit properly.

In the end, this two actions together will make our design less ‘dissolving’ since the usage of our interface will make the touching and interaction with our content less natural (remember that we are hopping for a transparent usage of the device, through your interface, to access your content).

Another example. If you observe a user interacting with a touch-based device on horizontal position, you will notice that only the users thumbs are upon the screen (that’s why I call them the users best friends!). If your content needs the user to swipe to access it, by designing your interface in a way that allows the users to use their thumbs without loosing the holding position of both hands, the experience will be more comfortable and less disrupting. The same applies for the placing of hotspots – designing solutions that enable users using their thumbs to hit the hotspots will allow the users to keep the two-hand hold of the tablet.

Last example. If the hand, as a pointer ‘device’ to access content by interacting with your interface, is so large compared with a mouse pointer on a computer and the screen of a tablet (one human hand covers approximately one third of the iPad screen), then the rewards you offer the user by interacting with your interface must be designed in order that those same rewards aren’t covered by the action you’ve ‘asked’ the user to perform.

Let me explain further this point imagine your content needs for you to create on your interface a three button solution. For each button tapped by your user, you give back one content ‘reward’. Whenever you design such an interface, always remember that the change on the screen that is going to happen because of the action you’ve asked should be visible immediately. If you design this in a way that the hand will cover the reaction to one action, users might think that the interface is not working – believe me, I’ve done this error and it happens!!

What I want to explain with these three examples is that when designing one interface for a touch-based device, the actual physics of the device and the way we use it have to be taken into account. Observing the way people hold and use tablets will tell you a lot about the way you should design interfaces for the device.

Actually, we’ve been also doing this when designing print and web interfaces for our content, but we’ve been doing it for so long that canons have been set and we no longer think about it (and we should) or we don’t even know why we design stuff using those canons (and again, we should know).

And what about content?

Content should always be the base of your interface design. There is no reason for designing one interface if it doesn’t solve the needs of the content it will display.

Also, we need to understand (as content producers) that tablets are fully digital devices and this means that content and the way we tell the content’s story must also evolve. Again, the way we produce our storytelling for print and web can give us some clues, but tablets and applications are a new medium of distributing our content and that also influences the way we must think and present our stories. I’ve written before about this subject on this blog, so I won’t add to the characters count by repeating myself. You can read the article here.

To help us further understand these questions of interface and designing applications for tablets, I’ve interviewed Joe Zeff, from Joe Zeff Design. Joe has just launched two iPad applications – ‘The Final Hours’ and  ‘Above & Beyond’ – that have gotten a good amount of press reviews and, most important, are also getting great reviews from the users that bought them on the App Store.

You can read the full interview here.

Conclusion

In the end, designing is not about creating one product or one interface. Designing is about finding answers to problems. Physical devices, with touch-base interfaces, present questions that weren’t previously existent and that must be answered in ways that we need to find out. We can do this by investigating, not only using what we’ve learned from previous practices (print and wed design), but also by acknowledging that the way the public use these devices will determine the way we design interfaces for our content on them.

In the last weeks Joe’s studio launched two new applications that are getting some great reviews. Since I was writing my post Designing for the Touch Interface, I thought it was a great excuse to ask Joe about his views on the subject. Please refer to my article in order to better understand the questions I made to Joe

Most important, don’t forget to check Joe’s latest apps The Final Hours and Above & Beyond.

Digital Distribution: As someone who studies tablet apps, what are the most common mistakes you find on app’s interfaces?

Joe Zeff: I see a lot of apps that confuse users by using every conceivable orientation, without clear signals about how to navigate from one screen to the next. Just because the iPad can flow pages in two directions and present layouts in two orientations doesn’t mean the user wants to continually swipe and turn their device to move from the beginning to the end of an app.

DD: Since the launch of the iPad, early last year, Apple has told developers to take into account that the size of a finger is much bigger and less precise then that of the mouse pointer. When you design your applications UI, how do you take into account this kind of specifications ?

JZ: Oversized buttons and ample spacing between tappable elements. We generally make those areas much larger than what’s shown on screen to ensure that each tap delivers the intended result.

DD: From your experience, what other sort of UI constrains are to be taken into account for designing for touch powered navigation devices?

JZ: The best interfaces are intuitive and transparent. “Above & Beyond: George Steinmetz” is an example of this. We did include a How To section, even though the interface is self-evident.

DD: Developers tend to design their apps both for vertical and horizontal orientation of the device’s screen. Do you think that one orientation is more comfortable (hence more used) than the other? Do you also take this into account when designing apps?

JZ: I’m a strong believer in single-orientation apps, most often horizontal. Rather than spend twice the effort to create the same app twice, I’d rather create two different apps. I prefer horizontal format because it allows for bigger images while maintaining a solid text-to-art mix at the top of the screen. But every publication is different. Time seems right as a vertical, while Sports Illustrated seems more comfortable as a horizontal. Go figure.

DD: I’ve been consuming lots of content with my iPad, every other night. By doing this, I have found that, after a while, my arms ache a bit. Even if it’s a lightweight device, the iPad will take its toll when you spend a couple of hours reading on it.
Do you think this should be taken into account, when designing the app UI? How?

JZ: The iPad 2 is far better than the original when it comes to portability and usability. I’m writing this now while laying in bed, and its very comfortable. That said, I find that all of the swiping gets tedious at times. Better to tap an edge to advance screens.

DD: Regarding my ‘aching arms’, I’ve come to think that the more a interface ‘makes you’ hold the tablet with just one hand to tap into content with the other, the more it gets ‘uncomfortable’. Do you think we should refrain our UI design from asking too much interaction from our users?

JZ: Interaction is what makes the iPad special. Rather than limit the opportunities, I’d argue that its more important to ensure that each opportunity delivers a sufficient payoff to the user. The best content is active, not passive, and the emphasis on quality is what matters most.

DD: Any final thoughts you want to share with us?

JZ: Thanks for the opportunity to present my opinions. There are no rights or wrongs – every app is different, and should be designed to best suit its content, purpose and audience. What works for one app doesn’t necessarily make sense for another. The danger in establishing standards is that everything begins to look alike. Best practices are a starting point, not a destination.

DD: Joe, thank you so much and all the best for your next projects. We look forward for what you’ll do next.

Nowadays, with the push mobile has given publishers around the world, a new challenge is faced by the ‘old’ teams. Applications (be it on mobile or web based) need a new language. We no longer need ‘just’ online and print journalists.

What we need is interactive journalism.

What we need are professionals that can create digital narratives.

Let me explain this by telling a small story myself. Ten thousand years ago, in the Northern part of Portugal lived a storyteller. His name was John of the Paleolithic (JP for his friends and fellow tribesman). Now, JP had the important task of transmitting the tribe’s knowledge onto younger generations. One day, a small child from the tribe asked JP, as he finished the day’s story; ‘JP, what shall become of us, once you are gone?’

That question made JP think, and hard he though. There must be a better way to tell my stories. A better way to share the knowledge of the tribe to the children and to the children after them.

JP knew he must find an answer to this question. And what does one do, when he needs innovation? JP went to the tribe’s inventor, Steve of the many jobs (SJ for now on). What JP needed was for SJ to come up with a way, a tool, that would allow for a better storytelling.

SJ was excited by the new challenge and went on thinking and inventing. One day, after the day’s story, SJ called for JP. ‘Here is the solution for your problem’, he said. ‘It’s called ink and with it you can paint your stories and generations after generations will be able to learn from your knowledge, long after you’re gone’.

Ten thousand years ago, someone painted the rocks in Vale do Côa with daily stories. Those stories are still there to be learned by anyone.

Why have I made up this story? Because, from the beginning of human kind, we have always used new tools to enhance our storytelling.

This is what we need to achieve today. Find the best innovative way to enhance the way we tell our stories.

What we need is interactive journalism.

‘But we already have it, we have a team of online content producers’, I can hear some of you saying.

Online journalism is not interactive journalism; at least no more than online journalism is printed journalism. Which doesn’t mean we can’t do both of them – actually the three of them, as I intent to show with this article.

What is interactive journalism then? Like JP and SJ from my story, we need to use every technological tool at our disposal to come up with the best language possible. From online we have the knowledge to make videos, slideshows, interactive graphics, audio files, etc. From print we have the powerful written word at all its might and the amazing world of photography, rich, big, storytelling pictures.

Interactive journalism is using all of this tools mixed together (and I need to put some emphasis on MIXED) to serve a story, the best way possible to suit the content’s need. Interactive journalism is serving the reader with the best stories, regardless of the tools we use.

Another bit of story, this time shorter and more seriously.

More than five hundred years ago, Johannes Gutenberg invented the mechanical movable type printing and changed history and stories. Until our days, through printing on a piece of paper, we had the best way of telling and of distributing our stories. Books where born, then newspapers, magazines, fanzines, etc. Each of this storytelling ‘frames’ appeared from a technologic innovation, but all of them where based on the invention of printing on paper. Paper was the best way to share knowledge around.

Then came the Internet and the beginning of digital distribution. World Wide Web means no physical boundaries for publishers and for their stories and it’s an amazing invention and an amazing tool.

Sadly, let’s face it, news publishers failed big time in using this new tool. End of story and history!

Move fast forward – like today’s inventive digital days – and the publishing business has found the beautiful world of applications, of Smartphone and tablets and, most important, publishers found a way to make business from digital distribution.

Regardless of its bumpy start, not many of us can say for sure that applications, with paid content, aren’t here to stay (at least for a while!).

With tablets looking to become a huge market, Smartphone will get the focus they deserve, which is to provide its users with smart, informative services (and there’s a huge market for publishers here!) and our new friends, the tablets, will be the tools for storytelling.

And this brings us again to the role of interactive journalism.

Think with me, with a fully digital device as a publishing tool, do you really think that written word with accompanying pictures is the best way to tell your stories to your readers? It might be, on some cases, but on the other hand, it might not be so.

Content is king!

Never was that phrase so true. And if content is indeed king the way to present it should be determined by its royal decree. As interactive journalists, it is our duty to use every tool we have at hand – and create some new ones in the way – to take full advantage of a digital canvas and create stories with the full content’s exploitation.

In the end, what interactive journalism is its to have knowledge of the full potential of every digital tool available and to have ideas on how to use them to create amazing stories (the ones that will last ten thousand years?).

Let me show you some examples of what I mean.

Look (and ear) this amazing piece from NYT’s Cathy Horyn. Feel the way pictures and audio are synchronized. It’s a four-minute piece (NYT files it under video, I rather call it an audio slideshow) that flows like a breeze. Now compare it to an online article, also from the NYT, also about Milan’s Fashion Week. A bit dull, isn’t it? You get the slideshow, for you to explore at your own pace, but it doesn’t integrate with the text, does it? Actually, both the slideshow and the text work in separate ways, you either see the pictures first, or read the text.

So, if you where to publish a story on a tablet application, about Milan’s Fashion Week, which one would you choose?

Another NYT example (you got to love this guys!), an interactive graphic on the rebellion in Libya, day by day. If you want to learn what has happen and what is happening on the North African country, the graph itself tells you the story. For each day, readers can read the related article, it opens on another page! This is a very good example of how interactivity and the power of the written words can come together for an excellent storytelling experience. On a tablet application, I would make a button on each daily map to present the text. On currently used application design this is really easy to achieve by using scrolling text, above the background map picture.

For amazing stories, mixing pictures, audio and video, you can’t get any better than Media Storm. I’m a huge fan of their work and the quality of the stories on their website are a step ahead of everyone out there. As an example, look at the work produced by Toronto’s Star photographer Lucas Oleniuk. Airsick: An Industrial Devolution is a great example of digital narrative. This is a feature story by itself on any tablet news application.

Of course that, to produce this kind of content, we need knowledge inside the newsrooms. As interactive journalists, we must be able to find that knowledge. Look on the print team and on the online team to find the best enablers for such solutions. It isn’t really that hard, every set of people has a handful of persons that are thrilled and motivated by challenges. And, if you need some kind of know-how that is not within your team, hire a freelancer. You already do it for illustrations, for articles, etc, why not do it for one video editing, or for an interactive graphic?

Once you find those challenge motivated persons, cherish them; those team members are the change elements inside your newsroom. These early enablers are the knowledge basis of the change every newsroom around the world will have to face and overcome on these new days of digital distribution of your stories. Now, go for it!

I was then even more thrilled by Camerons’ proposal that this gravitational forces, the applications that will ‘force’ down content on you and me, would share some revenue with content creators. I’ve always been an advocate that content has value and due value must be payed for it.

For some of us blogging, the payment might be in form of page views, since such gravitational apps might bring many more readers to us. But for some content producers, like news media companies, there is a real cost/value for the content they produce. And, in the end, if a professionally created content doesn’t have any real value, I know the gravitational tools will not make it leave its’ orbit and flow down to me, just because I don’t want it.

For such a set of tools, I’m willing to pay something as a reader and get something in return; the right content (which might not be the content I was looking for in the first place – apps that learn what I need) and as a content producer I get, either exposure, or payment for my hard produced content.

After reading Camerons’ article I was thinking that his proposal made sense but it still had some details to work on. What about all those applications are provide a great service but are free or don’t share it’s revenues with the content producers? I know that there will never be a solution that works in a bullet-proof way, but I believed we could work on Camerons’ idea and fine tune it.

Then, just yesterday I started reading about the News.me application. I thought, great another tool to read links from my Twitter. I really love this applications and have been using Pulse, Flipboard and Zite for it. I’ve also downloaded Flud, but I don’t use it that much.

I downloaded News.me and started it. OK, it asks for my email (doesn’t need it to work) and it asks me to login to my Twitter account. Fine, I did it. Then, on the second screen it lets me know I can use the app for free for a week and then I will have to pay a weekly fee to keep using it. Wait! What? I though it was time to really read those posts talking about News.me.

I went to the apps’ website and there it is, you need to pay a weekly fee because News.me pays publishers a fee to use their content. Uhau! There’s a page just for publishers on their website. I read it and it’s true, not only the app is already working with some major news media publishers, it makes it easy for any publisher to enrol with the app. It pays publishers for every time one of its’ articles is read by a News.me user.

Amazing, just a couple of days I was reading this great article from Cameron Koczon and now here it is, just before my own eyes. Talk about the digital world moving fast (or the wonderful world of coincidences!). Right, I’ll go for the free week and if I like the service I’ll choose the year subscription. Actually, I advise anyone that likes to consume content, from Twitter, to go for News.me.

After playing with News.me for a while the previous thoughts about Orbital Content appeared again. I was thinking that this was the way to go but then I started thinking on a publishers perspective. If I’m a publisher, each time a new ‘gravitational’ application is launched on the market I will have to start working with it. OK, if you’re in business you need to earn your profits, but this kind of solution multiplied by a number of apps might become a bit hard to handle.

On top of this, I still have the previous problems, the free apps that use content regardless of its’ creators being whiling or not for the apps to use it (yes, I’m thinking about Zite, Flipboard on its’ first days, even thinking on Google if I want to go the ‘Murdoch’ way).

Another concern is, if I’m the NYT and if one application is using my feeds to grow its’ business, I can always call them back and tell them to use it under certain circumstances or else… What about the Portuguese publishing company that I work for? Or the publisher for that Zimbabwe newspaper? Are small publishers not entitled to get payed for their content if they so wish?

I was back to the drawing board… How to use Camerons’ article idea, exemplified on New.me and still make it work as best as possible? One answer comes to mind: royalties! Think about it, regardless of legal confusions (and there seems to be a lot), changes and ‘black holes’ in it, music royalties have been working for the music industry for some time now (read about it here). Couldn’t the publishing industry learn from it’s mistakes, work upon the current state of music royalties and build a system that could work across the publishing world, allowing for content producers to get paid for their content?

I believe it can be done. Here is roughly how it might work: Content producers would choose either to be payed, or not, for their content. Under Creative Commons, content producers that want to share freely their content are free to do so. Also, by omission, every content producer would be considered to be allowing for free content sharing, unless it made clear it chooses otherwise.

Content royalties would be paid to its’ producers (using News.me method of pay per view) through a organization(s) that would collect those royalties from… you’ve nailed it!… the gravitational applications Cameron Koczon writes about.

If, on the other side, you’re working on the next killer application to provide users/readers with content from the web, you’ll either just use those articles under CC or you can use paid content, by paying a royalty fee. This paying fee includes applications like News.me, Flipboard or Zite but also Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. If your application enables sharing content, you’ll pay a fee.

If it can work for music, either with radio broadcasting, Internet  or even restaurants and bars (at least in some countries), it can also work for written content.

If you are a publisher, you’ll get those royalties from the organization I’ve written before. If your publishing business has a paywall, you’l provide the organization with an open feed to be used by the paying apps. You no longer have to enrol with every application developer.

Of course every system has its’ flaws and I’m sure this one has its’ own. There will always be some developers that will make applications outside this rules. Please let me know your thoughts and the flaws with this idea on the comments bellow or please email me. You can find my contacts on the About Me page. I hope to ear from you.

Douglas Hebbard has been publishing Talking New Media since 2009. On his site, Douglas not only writes about new digital platforms but he also tests news media applications from across the world.

I am a huge fan of Talking New Media and I follow it on a daily basis. There is really no better way to be in touch with everything that is happening on the digital side of publishing. Douglas has been so kind as to ask me to write for his website.

Because of, not only Douglas’ previous professional expertise in the publishing business, but also because of his knowledge on the leading edge of tablet news media applications, I wanted to have his view of the market so far and share it with you.

Here is what Douglas Hebbard, from Talking New Media, had to say

Digital Distribution: We are big fans of your website Talking New Media. Can you please tell us a bit about the site, what you focus on it and the audience response to it?

Douglas Hebbard: TNM is written for the media professional making the transition to new digital publishing platforms. It is written specifically for newspaper, magazine and book publishing professionals, though a large percentage of readers are actually those solely involved in New Media already: tablet-only publishers like Chris English of Hoodgrown Magazine, app developers, digital publishing solution vendors.

DD: You’ve been testing applications ever since the iPad was launched. What are the biggest improvements you’ve witnessed during this time?

DH: I think that those products that are being released that have been developed specifically for the iPad, that is, native apps, have improved somewhat over the last year. Whether they are using tools from Adobe, WoodWing, or creating the product from scratch, these publications are improving gradually. Less effort is being spent trying to “wow” readers, and more effort is spent making their products easier to read and a more enjoyable experience.

Unfortunately, the same can not be said for the “replica” editions being produced. Far too many publishers continue to take the easy, less expensive route of outsourcing their products to companies that promise easy, quick and cheap tablet publishing, while forgetting that these products still have to be enjoyable to read, and, importantly, have some sort of sound business model supporting them.

DD: Do you think that news media publishers are up to the task with their applications against apps like Flipboard or Zite?

DH: Yes and no. First, it is important to remember that we are still early in this game. While those of us who live and breathe digital publishing are very familiar with Flipboard and Zite, media names like the New York Times, the Guardian, El Pais or Le Figaro have better brand recognition than does a digital start-up. The key might be figuring out how to work with these new companies while incorporating some of their features into their own digital publishing products. But, it is also true, that far too many publishers are still trying to adapt to the web – adapting to mobile and tablet platforms may be beyond their abilities and imaginations.

DD: Talking New Media tests media apps from across the world. Do you see big differences between apps developed from the USA and from other markets?

DH: Honestly, I love looking at the apps coming from Europe, especially non-English language app. They are easier to look at with a fresh perspective. I also like to go into the different national App Stores to read what users of these apps feel about them. Americans are very cynical right now, and are quick to criticize anything.

I tend to only write about the best media apps I see from Europe and show them off to my readers. I don’t think a B2B publisher would normally download an app like “Odd Magazine” to look at what the developer is doing unless prompted by something they have read. Therefore, I almost never write about a simple RSS reader app from, say, Italy, because there are so many available for US publishers.

Because of the size of the American market, the number of media properties, combined with the large number of smartphones and tablets being sold in the U.S., I think the new platforms may develop a bit quicker here. Large publisher’s like Condé Nast or the New York Times have tremendous resources at their disposal, after all. No surprise then that it was here that News Corp. decided to launch The Daily as a $30 million experiment. For Rupert Murdoch, spending $30 million is insignificant when looking at the overall size of his US media holdings.

I am most optimistic and excited, however, about the work of independent publishers and developers, as well as new digital publishing companies being formed. That is where the really interesting work is being done.

DD: With the launch of new tablet platforms, like Android and RIM’s OS, some news application have been developed for those markets. What’s your opinion on the quality of the apps and how do you foresee the evolution of the tablet markets for media publishers?

DH: I am surprised that Google has messed up the launch of its Honeycomb version of the Android operating system. Right now there are few news apps available for Android that have been built specifically for Android driven tablets. Motorola (who launched the Android XOOM tablet) and RIM (who built the Blackberry PlayBook) made a mistake by not partnering with media companies to make sure that there would be media apps available to their tablets on the day these products launched. It goes to show you that technology companies can be as bad at partnering with media companies as media companies are at partnering with tech companies!

Long term, however, publishers will want to be developing products for Android tablets and other platforms, as well. The good news for publishers is that they can continue to concentrate their efforts right now on iOS devices and on mobile phones running Android.

DD: Given your experience, not only in testing news media apps since 2009, but most importantly inside the publishing business, both commercially and editorially, how do you think the business will be like in five years?

DH: No idea, seriously. I don’t do predictions because I don’t want John Gruber (publisher of Daring Fireball) pointing to one of my posts and pointing out how silly my prediction was.

But some things are always true: new media platforms are always being developed, and some of those involved in the old platforms adapt and become successful on the new platforms, while some can not make the adjustment. You have to remember that the vast majority of publishers are still having trouble learning how to make money online; for them, mobile and tablets are only another way to lose money.

Because of this, it would be safe to say that five years from now we will be talking about new companies the same way we today talk about FaceBook or Twitter. New companies will have arisen producing wonderful new products for readers, but some of the names that are important to us today will also be doing fine because they will have seen where their readers were heading and will have moved in that direction, as well.

DD: If you were to launch today a publication just for digital distribution, what would be your choices in terms of platform, business plan and editorial guidelines (would you enable social networks article sharing, would you have a ‘every minute’ content updated app, etc)

DH: Well, I would very much like to do that! I think that there are many different models that can work – and I am still a big believer in print, despite writing almost exclusively about digital. But I would launch a web-tablet-mobile product that can take advantage of a unified brand, but which would deliver to readers different experiences depending on what device you are using to access the product. The web has immediacy, but tablet publications can have both immediacy and “shelf life” like a print product. Tablets can deliver long-form journalism, but mobile products can utilize geo-location and communications features that are unique to the platform.

In any case, if anyone wants to fund a media start-up, I’m here and ready to go!

DD: Douglas, thank you so much for your time and insight. Do you have any final thoughts for our readers?

DH: Yes, best of luck to Digital Distribution!

I tend to agree with almost everything James writes on his article except for the apps last bit. I’ve written James an email stating this and he was kind enough to answer me. Thanks James!
On his reply he states that he believes applications will be a niche like Flash or Silverlight. This vision was already on his article when James wrote that “… if we want to create something with more permanence, that can evolve at a speed that suits us and our clients, then we need to look away from mobile apps and towards the mobile Web.”

This is where I tend to disagree  on his point of view. I don’t think that the web as we know and understand it right now will vanish, but I believe applications (being platform-specific) will be a huge part of the way users will surf the web in the future and relate with our costumers brands. Applications don’t have to be closed, just because they are developed for a specific platform. Look at the Zite app (that I use a lot!), from it I can share links on my Facebook, my Twitter, email the links and save them onto my Instapaper. Not bad for a close iOS app.

The problem with closed content, that we are witnessing right now, has nothing to do with it being ‘inside’ an app. The problem is that both on the Internet and on some apps, content is being shared without real profit for the producers of it. The previous mentioned app Zite has felt its’ share of discontent from publishers.
What is keeping content closed inside most publishers applications is the publishers themselves. And really, who can blame them? The Internet ‘move’ by publishers, where traditionally paid content was given for free under the premise that advertising would pay for it, was a really bad one. Applications and dedicated, easy stores, present a new digital opportunity to make business where the publishers where failing to do so.

I believe that publishers cannot live without social media. Either because Facebook and the likes represent a huge share of incoming visitors, through shared links; but also (and most important?) because digital users/readers expect this from digital publications. The one million dollars answer will be, how to allow social media sharing and get paid from content. What the New York Times has done with its’ paywall and the way it allows for social media sharing might work for the newspaper but I have doubts it will work for everybody.

To complete full circle, I think that what James advises on his article is 100% helpful for anyone planning on investing on their online/digital brand. My take would be to develop ‘almost’ everything based on web open standards and then develop dedicated, specific applications for the devices your clients are using out there.

Another very strong advantage for this solution is the way we will be able to produce clever interactive content that can explain in a much clear way some subjects.
A simple example comes in mind, how do you think a high school kid will better understand the simple physics principles of acceleration? On one hand we have traditional school books with its’ diagrams and text, on the other we can have a simple narrated video animation, with slow motion, instant replay, etc.
Another example could be this (please excuse all non reading Spanish users), a effective interactive infographics made by 90º Grados on the Berlin Wall. A simple, linear timeline where, with each touch, you are presented with a very focused information about the story of the wall, from its’ building to its’ fall.

Of course that I still believe our students need to be able to read text, memorize it, ‘sweat’ if you like, to learn something. There is no really easy way to learn something new. I just believe that with new tools we can do it much better.

And then we have all the fabulous social tools of todays’ Internet. By reading the enlighten article The Best Social Media Tool For the Classroom, by Richard Kassissich, one can better understand that our education really needs integrated tools that provide our students with the best learning experience. I strongly advise you to read his article. Richard comes to the conclusion that the best social media tool for teaching and learning is the discussion forum. He goes into great detail to explain why.

Imagine that each of our student tablets has integrated on the college application a powerful tool to discuss matters, not only with his colleagues, but also with the teachers. The technology to do so is here, we have this right now. We just need for someone to start working on it. Publishers around the world, with the help of teachers, designers and developers, should begin to experiment with this solutions. I believe a very strong market will arise, with benefits for both ends.