The strong union of breaking news, mobile first journalism

As a subscriber to The New Yorker, I also get the Newsletter, and a recent one touched upon a subject that is dear to me. Alas, I realized the impact of breaking news in a mobile first world.

In this newsletter, written by Michael Luo, editor of newyorker.com, he explains how the venerable New Yorker, that magazine with the unique typographic headline font, the iconic illustrations, and its wealth of illuminating content, now covers breaking news.

Yes, as Luo points out, for most of its history, The New Yorker was a weekly whose editors did not have to concern themselves with breaking news. But that was before the arrival of the Internet and our constant companion smartphones.

For most of its ninety-four-year history, The New Yorker was solely a weekly print magazine. Back then, editors didn’t have to figure out how to respond immediately to major breaking news. That changed with the advent of newyorker.com.

In this particular newsletter Luo takes us behind the scenes of how his magazine cooped with that horrific weekend in the United States when two massacres took place, one inside a Walmart store in El Paso, another in a club in Dayton, Ohio.

It was mid-afternoon on Saturday, August 3rd, when I started to see reports on Twitter of “multiple victims” in a shooting at a Walmart in Texas. Shortly afterward, David Rohde, who oversees news coverage for newyorker.com, sent an e-mail to me and two other editors with the subject line “El Paso.” “Hate writing these messages,” he wrote. That was the beginning of a discussion that took place over the next few hours—which included The New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick—about how we should cover the massacre.

The role of content managers

*Image from The Story (Thane And Prose, 2019), illustration by Paula Ripoll*

As I read Luo’s account of how he and his team managed the breaking news of these two massacres I was thinking that here we had a clear example of what good content managers do in such cases: to manage and to direct the flow of the story from start to finish, and not just for updates.

At the New Yorker, the editors managed to update the story for its breaking news elements, while also assigning analysis and interpretation and mobilizing those authors whom they knew had the expertise to handle the story beyond the 5 W’s.

During the next week following the shootings, newyorker.com would publish eighteen pieces of reporting and commentary, by thirteen authors, responding to the violence.

Bravo performance, and a case study of how to react to breaking news.

It is obvious that, while the New Yorker publishes its weekly edition faithfully, its editors are also thinking about stories and not just the edition.

The Story is here!

You can now download my new mobile storytelling book, The Story, from Apple Books at $6.99
This is Book 1 of a Trilogy! The other two books coming soon.
https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-story-volume-i/id1480169411

The newspaper remains the most powerful source of storytelling on the planet. But technology threatens its very existence. To survive, the Editor must transform, adapt, and manage the newsroom in a new way. Order The Story by Mario Garcia, chief strategist for the redesign of over 700 newspapers around the world.

News we like to share

My chat with in Monocle Radio

Listen to my chat in Monocle Radio’s The Stack: Latest episode‘The Face’ and ‘The Story’:We welcome the return of the print version of ‘The Face’ and talk to legendary newspaper designer Mario Garcia about his latest book, ‘The Story’.
https://monocle.com/radio/shows/the-stack/368/play/

My interview with CNN en Español

I was a guest in the program Encuentro, hosted by Guillermo Arduino daily at CNN en Español. The interview was about how we read on mobile devices and my introduction of my new mobile storytelling book, The Story, to a Spanish-language audience.

García: Si tienes una buena historia, la gente la va a leer

Mario’s speaking engagements

Presentation of The Story at the Sociedad Interamericana de Prensa (SIP) in Miami, as the organization celebrates its 75th anniversary serving the Latin American Press, Miami.

October 4, 2019