When we use the style of linear visual storytelling, we are creating content to be consumed primarily on a mobile device.

As readers of the blog know, the strategy is to combine text and visual assets together. You read, you see. This is the opposite of how we consume information in print, where we first see, then usually we read.

Part of my presentation for the Society of News Design in New York last weekend was to introduce linear visual storytelling to what was a packed house of editors, designers and technology folks.

At the end of the session, there were questions like these:

-“What would it take for us to do this kind of storytelling right now?”, and, “Do we need to have a different version of these stories for mobile and desktop?”

We maintain that it is quite easy even for technologically limited news organizations to try linear visual storytelling. It is a matter of creating templates and coordinating how basic text and images will flow.

Already several of the content management systems that newsrooms use provide the software to create such templates and allow for a journalist and/or visual storyteller to tell compelling stories with the narrative and the visuals in the order in which they would be in a normal text or What’s App chat.

Once a linear storytelling is built, it can be used for desktop and mobile alike.

Here is a sample template courtesy of CCI Europe and its Cue program: