Oh, the extremes of how we present information today.
It's the short and now—the raw meat, I call it.
It's the long and lean back and curated–the cooked sirloin.
And while I have been discussing the Two Tempos in all of my presentations recently, including during the Hearst Digital Media Lecture, April 25, at Columbia University, I am delighted to see it articulated so well by Janine Gibson, who was editor of The Guardian US where she led the paper’s New York coverage of the award-winning Edward Snowden story. Now, she’s headed back to London as editor in chief of theguardian.com.
Janine spoke recently to Julia Posetti of Media Shift.
Here are some highlights of her comments:
I think the trend to the very live continues, the need to be either extremely live and real time and breaking and rich as possible while you’re doing that (I don’t mean surface skimming), continues apace. At the same time there is a very obvious diversion of effort to the extremely long-term, long-form investigative story. When we started Guardian US we said we were going to do very, very live and almost documentary long-form and cut out all the stuff in the middle. And I think almost every news organization is now identifying that trend, so the new startups, largely billionaire funded, are all over it. People call it explainer journalism, or long-form journalism or investigative journalism, but really they mean something that has weight and meaning and impact beyond the transitory.
On the expense of doing multimedia packages
Obviously you have to make choices about resources, and we have made active choices about not doing the middle-range stuff, but that’s just as expensive, doing stuff that you could just take off the wires.
On how to be creative and innovative
One of the things that we learned when we were coming to New York is that doing things differently is incredibly liberating, saying it’s not about a newspaper or even a homepage or a website particularly, what are the ways we can do journalism differently — and then try until you figure it out. It’s incredibly liberating and exciting and makes more powerful storytelling, so from that comes NSA Decoded. So we absolutely think that data and interactives and graphics and multimedia and social and community are now at the heart of how we tell stories, not an adjunct. [And] you barely think of video as a separate thing anymore; it’s just a way of telling a story … That will only continue to grow.
For video of my Columbia University Hearst Digital Media Lecture:
http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aS1IPYalTt0