TAKEAWAY: There can be no unified, successful media quartet without first establishing a storytelling philosophy. Time for iWED, integrated writing/editing/design.
Once upon a time one of the biggest dilemmas and philosophical topics of discussion in a newspaper newsroom was usually that junction at which design and journalism met.
For those of you who lived thru the battles of the 80s, and parts of the 90s, there were the “word” people, and there were the “visual” people. Of course, the word people considered themselves a robust, intellectually superior and much more essential to a newspaper than the more eccentric visual people, who usually dressed in black, read alternative magazines and discussed things like the descenders of a certain letter g, as opposed to the ascenders on the d.
Those were the days. Newspapers were doing well financially. Subscriptions were still there, as was advertising, and, let’s not forget pages and pages of classified.
Seems like 100 years ago, doesn’t it?
That battle subsided, without the Supreme Court having to participate, thank goodness. Nobody talks about word people versus visual people anymore, or, if they do, it is behind closed doors with like minded listeners. There has been the total integration of these disciplines as it should be. The concept of WED (Writing-Editing-Design) which was the manifesto, the banner we carried in those days, is now deeply rooted and doing well, thank you. Editors come to designers as they plan stories. The New York Times even has a Chief Creative Director.
Who would have guessed?
New, more urgent battle today
Today’s battle is a more intrinsic one. Today the mano a mano seems to be between the print-centric editors/journalists and the digital side of the operation. Again, the print centrics consider themselves the heavy weights (even when confronted with different evidence), while the digital side is seen in many places as a group of youngsters playing in their fun sandbox.
IT will take from 5 to 10 years before we see this state of mind settled into what it should be: we are all storytellers, working across platforms and a digital storyteller is not inferior to a print storyteller, and, at the end of the day , the distinction should not even exist.
Meanwhile, however, and I am a repository of comments and arguments from publishers around the world, which is the reason I write about this topic today, there are times when the digital side of the operation has the upper hand and wants to proceed with enormous changes to its digital platforms, bypassing the “print” people.
Frustration has given way to a sense of abdication: “You can’t change these people, and the world is moving fast, so we better get on with the program and update our mobile products, create new ones and let the brand move forward.”
Easy to understand, but not a good solution.
All the platforms in the media quartet are there to disseminate the information gathered by the organization. Each platform has a role. But this is not going to work successfully if there is not an overall philosophy for how storytelling is conceptualized and carried out from start to finish.
Nobody can design your latest version of a mobile platform without a sound storytelling philosophy across the platforms. That is the first pivotal step to take. The rest will come easy—-well, let’s say easier.
It took more than a decade for the print people to truly accept the design people.
We simply don’t have that much time now. Let 2013 be the year when every news organization organizes a workshop with the key players and storytellers, establishes a foundation for how the organization will tell stories in each platform, do simulations, develop a style guide across platforms and let WED (Writing-Editing-Design) start looking more like iWED, a pledge to let these disciplines interact.
The audience will be the greatest beneficiaries.
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