TAKEAWAY: A US newspaper shows us that storytelling is now possible beyond the pages of the printed newspaper and the online edition. The St. Louis Beacon uses an app to tell the story of the record floods in its area of circulation. Publishers and editors can take a signal here of the possibilities that are available to take stories to the next level—-and platform.
In our weekend blog post we discussed the many possibilities available to newspaper and magazine publishers by simply tapping into the wealth of stories, photos and data they have in their libraries.
We added that the arrival of the iPad, and its wide popularity among audiences of all ages, makes it possible to publish some of these materials in a new format, and get readers to pay for it. The one-off publication is about to have its moment.
The arrival now of Apple’s iBooks Author, which, by the way we have adopted for our digital book, tentatively titled Storytelling in the Times of the iPad, and which we find easy to use, functional and a godsend in getting our ideas on to the pages (screens) of a book without a lot of difficulty. Add to that the multi sensory approach to storytelling, and it is no wonder that the nonprofit newspaper, St. Louis Beacon, just produced Meandering Mississippi, an ebook that collects its writing, photos, and video on last year’s record floods..
Readers who wish to sample this “collected memory” of the event will go into the iTunes store and pay 99 cents for 54 pages of text of Beacon stories with slideshows, audio, interactive graphics, and video interviews to try to enhance the storytelling.
Extending the life of those big stories
I have said it repeatedly: this is storytelling at its best, and with the iPad we have a marvelous platform to tell the stories with appeal to perhaps the most heterogenous and widest audience ever.
If, as journalists often say, a daily newspaper is all about reporting life as it happens, then with the new iBooks Author and the iPad, journalists are prepared to write the book of life’s occurrences and the events that touch the readers’ lives, presenting it in a platform that is more conducive to tell those stories in a more entertaining manner.
All that’s needed is the creative editors who can think of the possibilities.
