As always, I am honored to have been invited to provide my prediction for the coming year as part of the Neiman Lab series. Every year, Harvard’s Nieman Lab invites media people to offer their take on what will be happening in the year ahead.

Not that anyone can predict the future with certainty, but we can try. And we do.

Here is my prediction for 2018:

http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/12/storytelling-finally-adapts-to-mobile/

Indeed, the new year will bring news organizations of all sizes around the world to come to terms with the fact that a majority of users are consuming news and information via mobile platforms, specifically on their phones. We must create content for that platform, to make the process of consuming the information easier.

What I refer to as linear visual storytelling combines text and visuals, in the same continuum as when we have a text message or What’s App conversation with someone: we write, we show. That is the ideal storytelling for the pbone as well.

Our workshops

We emphasize just that style of creating and executing content for mobile platforms in all of our workshops.

In a typical workshop we first begin with a solid presentation of the concept, followed by a hands on exercise in which we ask the participants to take two stories already published by their newspaper/magazine which were handled in a traditional way: headline, summary, text, then added visuals. Then we take those stories and transform them to the style of linear storytelling.

It is amazing to see the distinction. Once journalists and designers understand the concept of linear visual storytelling, then they are ready to apply it. In workshop after workshop across six continents, we see the progress almost immediately.

It is part of the reason that doing what we do is exciting, especially at the present, with transformations a key issue in newsrooms. Below we see Catherine Schwaab, an editor at France’s Paris

Match, showing her colleagues the work she and her group carried out during a recent internal workshop in Paris: