Tag Archives: Education

Alex Blumberg’s “And What’s Interesting…” Storytelling Test

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I recently stumbled upon a 2005 article by NPR radio producer and journalism instructor Alex Blumberg that offers some great advice for determining if a reporter is on the right track to a good story. I’ve been using it regularly in the classroom. It’s simple, concrete, and has helped my students focus their reporting.

Blumberg calls it the “and what’s interesting” test. He writes:

You simply tell someone about the story you’re doing, adhering to a very strict formula: “I’m doing a story about X. And what’s interesting about it is Y.”

So for example… “I’m doing a story about a homeless guy who lived on the streets for 10 years, and what’s interesting is, he didn’t get off the streets until he got into a treatment program.” Wrong track. Solve for a different Y.

Y = “… and what’s interesting is there’s a small part of him that misses being homeless.” Right track.

Y = “… and what’s interesting is, he developed surprising and heretofore unheard of policy recommendations on the problem of homelessness from his personal experience on the streets.” Right track.

Y = “… and what’s interesting is, he fell in love while homeless, and is haunted by that love still.” Right track.

Y = “… and what’s interesting is, he learned valuable and surprising life lessons while homeless, lessons he applies regularly in his current job as an account manager for Oppenheimer mutual funds.” Right track. In other words, who the hell knows what you might find out. Just don’t settle for the story you already know. Find the exciting or surprising or unusual moment, and focus the story on that.

Here are some other takeaways from the article that I’ve found particularly helpful for students:

  • Don’t confuse a location or premise with an actual story.
  • In order to find a story, you need someone to talk to and a situation to discuss.
  • Trust the first question that comes to you. Figure out what question you want to answer or what story you want to hear. If the question seems obvious, chances are it’s a story.
  • Just because something is a story or takes the form of a story doesn’t mean it’s an interesting story.
  • Don’t pursue a story just because it’s story you’ve heard before. In fact, do the opposite. Look for the story that is the most surprising and unexpected.
  • People often tell you the boring part first. Sometimes they think it is exciting or think it’s what they are supposed to tell a reporter. Dig deeper. If you are bored, your audience will be bored.
  • Everyone has a story, but it’s not always that interesting or something you can adapt. If you don’t have a story, find someone else.

Why I Am Adding Brian Stelter’s “What I Learned in Joplin” to My Course Reading

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A screen grab of Brian Stelter's Instagram photo page. He used the photo sharing app to report on the aftermath of the tornadoes in Joplin, Missouri.

I am adding “What I Learned in Joplin,” a personal blog post by New York Times reporter Brian Stelter, to the reading list for my fall Online Journalism course.

In the post, Stelter’s reflects on his experience of trying to cover the aftermath of the tornado that hit Joplin, Missouri in May. Due to unreliable Internet and phone service, Stelter did much of his reporting using social media – texting, tweeting, and posting photos via Instagram.

Stelter’s post has generated some spirited debate on journalism blogs, including Jeff Jarvis questioning if traditional news articles might be a luxury in the Internet age and Michael Ingram’s response to Jarvis, “No, Twitter is Not a Replacement for Journalism.” While I find this debate intriguing, I am including Stelter’s article in my course for more practical reasons.

Here are some things I like about his experience and blog post:

It’s About Reporting
Stelter covers TV and media for the New York Times and was traveling to Chicago to cover the final episode of the Oprah Winfrey show a few hours after the tornado hit. On the plane, he decided to delay his trip and go report on the devastation of the small town. He lacked preparation and experience, but he followed his instincts.

It seems like an obvious choice, but on the night Osama bin Laden death was announced rowdy student-led celebrations broke out on my college campus, I observed a range of responses from my journalism students. Some continued to study for exams. Some stayed in their dorm rooms and followed it on Facebook and Twitter. And some grabbed cameras and went live on the campus TV station to report the story.

Old Advice for New Media Reporting
Many of the things Stelter lists as his lessons learned sound like a nagging journalism instructor or an Intro to News Reporting textbook. Carry extra pens. Bring backup batteries. Avoid the pack of reporters. Wear sturdy, comfortable shoes. McDonald’s has WiFi. All obvious, but essential, advice.

Using Social Media as a Reporting Tool
With his cell phone, Stelter was able to send out short bursts of texts and photos. He tweeted and snapped photos as a form of note taking, but also to relay that information to others.

He writes:

I parked a block from the south side of the hospital and approached on foot, taking as many pictures as possible, knowing I’d need them later to remember what I was seeing.

And:

I started trying to tweet everything I saw — the search of the rubble pile, the sounds coming from the hospital, the dazed look on peoples’ faces. Some of the texts didn’t send, but most did. Practically speaking, text messages were my only way to relay information.

And because he created this record of online information, it could be easily incorporated into the overall news coverage. A link to Stelter’s Twitter feed, which has more than 60,000 followers, was put on the homepage of NYTimes.com.

Revisiting Tweets to Create a Stronger Story
Stelter’s tweets from the scene tell their own unique story. There are concrete facts, descriptive scenes, and quotes from survivors and rescue workers. But Stelter also notes the limits of this kind of reporting and storytelling. He writes that it would be helpful to have an editor “rewriting the reporters’ tweets and reworking them into the live news story.”

He also writes:

I believe it’s true that ‘my best reporting was on Twitter,’ but only up until a certain point on Monday, probably around 11 p.m. local time. After that point, with a more stable Internet connection, I was able to file complete stories for NYTimes.com, not just chunks of copy.

At that point, Stelter could incorporate his reporting into a front-page story that provided a richer overview of the events, not just brief snapshots.

“What I Learned in Joplin” also has a simple, yet effective, story structure. Stelter begins with an anecdote that contains concrete and vivid details. And then he has a moment of reflection (“What I Learned”) when he explains the point of the anecdote. He repeats this refrain – anecdote and moment of reflection – seven times in the blog post.

By revisiting his tweets and experiences, Stelter turns even “a stream of consciousness” blog post into a compelling narrative.

Three Resources for Exploring the Narrative Structures of Digital Journalism

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The standard conventions of print news writing are tried and tested. The narrative structures of digital and multimedia journalism are less so.

“That’s why innovation in a newsroom isn’t just learning how to shoot and embed video or using Twitter to cover a live event,” Ronald Yaros wrote in American Journalism Review. “Innovation must also include developing, testing, and using new story techniques that keep audiences engaged.”

To better understand and teach multimedia storytelling, I’ve been hunting for narrative metaphors and structures for online news.

Here are three resources on the subject that I have found useful:

Alternate Story Forms

Alternate story forms break down information by theme and organize stories into chunks that can be scanned and understood easily by readers. Suitable for the web and often for newspapers and magazines, alternate story forms include:

  • Q&As
  • f.a.q.s
  • glossaries
  • checklists
  • timelines
  • quizzes
  • games

A Poynter News University online course on alternate story forms, developed by Andy Bechtel of the University of North Carolina, is a great resource for exploring the topic and learning which stories work best for which formats.

The online course itself is a nice example of the use of alternate story forms. It employs tightly written text boxes, interactive exercises, and animation. And it that allows the user to explore the information in a non-linear manner.

PICK Model for Online News

Multimedia is often defined as the use of various elements: text, audio,  photos, video, graphics, and animation. But a group of researchers at University of Maryland define multimedia journalism as a cohesive experience.

They analyze how a webpage or website combines media to create a narrative environment for the user.

To explain their findings, researchers developed the P.I.C.K. model. It focuses on:

  • Personalization – How content in a multimedia story relates to the user’s needs and interests.
  • Involvement – The degree to which technology enables users to participate with choices, responses or content.
  • Contiguity – How text, words, graphics, and animation are presented together.
  • Kick-outs – Minimizing anything that competes with the users’ attention and compels them to go elsewhere.

The goal is to move beyond simply throwing together text and video and understanding how everything works together. One finding is that text is still key in explaining how all of the story elements relate to one another.

Journalism in the Age of Data

Data visualization is the display of complex information through graphics and animation. It has become a standard way to display election results, geographic locations, and complex statistical or financial data.

A great resource for exploring the subject is Journalism in the Age of Data, a video report and website created by Geoff McGhee. It includes interviews with journalists at the New York Times, MSNBC, and BBC, examples of how newsrooms are collaborating on projects, and websites for beginners like ManyEyes and Flare.

It also presents an overview of the research of Edward Segel and Jeffrey Heer from Stanford University, who study the narrative structures of online news data visualizations. Their research analyzes dozens of examples currently employed by online news organizations and looks for common narrative devices and story elements.

They identify seven basic narrative genres in data visualization:

  • magazine style
  • annotated chart
  • partitioned poster
  • flow chart
  • comic strip
  • slide show
  • film/video/animation

They also describe how newsrooms are adopting the storytelling techniques of film, graphic design, animation, and video games to cover the news.

Do We Need a New Journalism Vocabulary?

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Recently, I’ve encountered some convincing arguments that we may need an entirely new language for understanding and practicing journalism.

A friend recommended I read a book called  The Little Book of Contemplative Photography by  Howard Zehr, a professor and documentary photographer who contends that the words and metaphors of photography – “taking a picture,” “shooting,” “aiming” – are predominately aggressive and predatory, but also inaccurate.

Zehr writes:

This metaphor of taking an image does not accurately reflect the photographic process itself. When we photograph, we do not actually reach out and take anything. A camera is basically a dark box with a receptor (film or digital sensor) on one side and a small opening on the other… When we do photography, we receive an image that is reflected from the subject. Instead of photography as taking, then we can envision it as receiving. Instead of a trophy that is hunted, an image is a gift.

Zehr goes on to suggest new ways of talking about photography. He sees:

  • Image as received vs. image taken
  • Image as ours vs. image as mine
  • Subject as co-creator, collaborator vs. subject as an object
  • Photography as revelation vs. photography as expose.

I found the idea compelling, but wondered if it could be translated to other forms of journalism.

For one, Zehr’s photography is deeply connected to his religious, philosophical, and personal beliefs. He is an advocate for restorative justice, a way of approaching crime that emphasizes repairing the harm done to the whole community, not just punishing the offender. This is evident in his portraits of  victims of crimes, as well as photographs of men and women serving life sentences in prison.

Many journalists, I thought, might be suspicious of such a value-laden approach and suspicious of the language shift as well.

A few days later I stumbled upon a Web site called Journalism That Matters founded by group of news editors who hope to save the industry by rethinking traditional newsroom culture, approaches, and metaphors.

Journalism That Matters argues that the news process should be defined as:

  • Conversation rather than a lecture
  • Many-to-many rather than one-to-many
  • Community connector rather than a central authority
  • Relationship-centric rather than knowledge-centric.

I find both of these vocab-lessons valuable in thinking about how journalism might be re-imagined.

In both of these paradigms, journalism education might be less about teaching students how to gather and distribute information and more about helping students engage with the people and communities they are covering.

Does the World Really Need Another Blog?

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No. But apparently I do.

My name is Mark Berkey-Gerard. I am a college journalism teacher. I teach online and multimedia journalism courses at Rowan University in Southern New Jersey.  I spend a lot of my day teaching students how to do “techie” things.

But my real passion – and my real challenge – is helping students become better storytellers and helping them learn how to use technology to create forums for authentic interaction and conversation.

So I’ve created this blog to:
•    Flesh out my own ideas about journalism, new media, and education.
•    Offer resources (links, articles, books, people, tutorials, workshops).
•    Open up my teaching approach to my students.
•    Invite others – journalists, teachers, students, and anyone who cares – to offer their own insights and ideas.

The title of the blog is inspired by the writings of educator James Carey, who thought of journalism as a kind of collective campfire storytelling. “Conversation not only forms opinions, it forms memory,” Carey wrote. “We remember best the things that we say, the things the we say in response to someone else with whom we are engaged. Talk is the surest guide to remembering and knowing what we think.”

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