It is all about the story on the new tablet platform.
This is a textbook about storytelling. Although its central premise is storytelling on the new platform we refer to as a tablet, it has its roots in the processes that lead us to capture the essence of a story, think about all the possibilities to present it and explore the most effective ways to engage an audience.
My training as a storyteller began when I chose to study journalism, but I was engaged by stories and storytellers long before that time. My paternal grandmother would read me stories in my early childhood in Cuba. As a child actor in the Havana of the 1960s, I was studying my lines for the various roles I played on television, theater and in one film. At the age of eleven, I was already so aware of the power of stories, especially those about people, that I embarked on an adventure as publisher. I became the writer, editor and designer for a mimeographed newspaper I called Critica y Arte (something like Art and Reviews), which I sold for about five cents inside the studios of CMQ network.
What has changed? Some fifty years later, I continue to be in the storytelling business and am still as mesmerized by the power of a good story to seduce an audience. My role for decades has been as a visual journalist: engaging audiences with the way stories are packaged and designed.
Much is discussed today about whether one medium or the other is the most important: “Print first” or “digital first” is the typical debate. In my opinion, the story comes first, as it has since the Bible, Aesop’s fables and the earliest radio broadcasts. Here I am in 2012, writing this digital textbook about storytelling for the tablet. I find myself totally engaged with this marvelous platform whose potential we have only begun to discover as we take baby steps from news apps in version 1.0 to future generations of 5.0 and beyond. Some of my colleagues ask me why I have embraced the iPad with such gusto, even asking if I have lost my loyalty to print. In response, I simply shake my head, repeat the word nonsense and remind them that my loyalty is to the storytelling process, not to a medium.
It is my hope that students and practitioners of our craft who are reading this textbook will realize that telling stories in our times requires a variety of skills. The story is not just about the narrative that tells it but also about the headline that first grabs our attention and the look and feel that determines how the story will appear visually. These are all systematic processes that every storyteller needs to be aware of. In this textbook, we hope to show you how to explore the full potential of each story. These are truly the best of times to tell stories on a variety of platforms. The tablet is the newest, and I find myself thrilled to explore storytelling on it.
People are now looking for their news on the tablet. They come to read, see photos, watch videos, listen to audio stories and music, play and shop. According to the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, tablet users are more likely than the general public to follow the news frequently. 68 percent of tablet users consider themselves people who follow news “all or most of the time.” In fact, according to the publisher of The New York Times, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., “many are now consuming more news than ever across platforms: Over 80 percent of iPad users read The Times on at least two platforms, and half of them juggle three or more.”
This same sentiment is echoed in almost every focus group in which we have participated to date: Even if the tablet is a so-called “lean-back” platform for passive actions, users are always ready to exercise their option to lean forward and tap into an update of the news. This is why I recommend to all who are developing a news app that they include three tracks: the curated edition, the frequently updated news feed and the e-reader (PDF pages of the printed publication). Users choose between the three depending on the time of day, their mood, specific needs or reading habits. I am convinced, though, that it is the curated edition, with a select number of articles, photos and videos, that constitutes the “fun” part of reading on the tablet; the news updates and the e-reader are secondary but very necessary.
We create for today’s audience: users who are smart, tech-savvy, impatient and do not wish to be limited to just one option to get their information. The tablet, it seems, offers the perfect menu of choices—as long as editors and designers cook up the Sunday brunch.
Much discussion centers on the possible competition between tablet and print editions, with the word cannibalization often appearing in the conversation . However, in my view, tablets compete more directly with online news reading.
Based on a variety of surveys (some of which will be detailed later in this text), the majority of users engage with their tablets in the evening while “snacking” on mobile phone and online information during the day. We will therefore see major changes in how editors present stories on news websites. News websites are the essential providers of breaking news (concurrently with or after the mobile telephone). The mobile phone and the computer become lean-forward platforms that we check frequently during our working hours. Our main interest in visiting news websites is to update our knowledge of what is happening, stay current with developing stories, then take a break and come back later to repeat the activity. We do this news “snacking” for two- to four-minute periods. Chances are that this time is not the most opportune for us to see a gallery of photos, spend time with a video or digest a lengthy article.
These activities are better suited to the tablet, that more relaxing, lean-back platform that we engage with when we are kicking off our shoes and enjoying much-needed downtime at the end of the day. Anyone who reads long narratives regularly can testify to the fact that those are more enjoyable to read on the canvas of the tablet than on the screen of a computer.
Websites of the future are likely to be lean and mean; less cluttered; more informative; more likely to spend resources in the constant updating of news and less in the more visual aspects of presentation, such as photos and video. The websites of The Boston Globe and Frankfurter Allgemeine, for example, are in the vanguard of these future sophisticated news sites.
It is all part of the new mantra of news media: not just about storytelling as the protagonist but also about understanding the lifestyle of users and the uniqueness of each platform with which they engage.
I vividly recall the first time I heard “one of us” (meaning a so-called newspaper designer or print journalist) talk about a tablet for reading the news. It was Roger Fidler, and in 1990, a group of us had gathered at the American Press Institute in Reston, Virginia, for a seminar titled “The Newspaper of 2020.” Roger did not show up with a piece of paper for his front page of the future. Instead, it was a tablet. Not as pretty as the ones we are used to seeing today, but, still, it was a showstopper at that gathering. As early as 1988, Fidler was already experimenting with how to take a newspaper and translate it to a tablet. By 1991, he had developed the first limited functional prototype of a tablet newspaper.
Roger Fidler is the visionary who introduced us to what the tablet platform might be. We admire his discipline in continuing with such work in what must have been frustrating and disheartening circumstances. It was not like the publishing world embraced his early prototypes, treating them instead as fascinating and futuristic but “not something we will do right away.”
But right away came soon enough. Right away is here and now. Now at the University of Missouri’s Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute, Roger continues to participate actively in all that has to do with the tablet. Except his audience now sees what he does as still fascinating, but very much of the present, something every editor needs to pay attention to. As we introduce a new generation of journalists to storytelling on the tablet, we extend a salute to Roger Fidler, who paved the way.
Watch the 1994 Knight Ridder video, “The tablet newspaper: A vision for the future.”
For all the obvious reasons, any discussion of tablets leads to technology. Today there are many technological solutions available for newspapers and magazines to transfer their content to the tablet. We have worked with several, including those that are homegrown products, where the IT staffers of a specific magazine or newspaper create content solutions for the tablet. It is because of this vast array of technological solutions that we do not intend for this text to dwell very specifically on one content platform.
While Apple’s iPad dominates the market, other tablets are beginning to appear: those from Amazon and Barnes & Noble, the many running Google’s Android operating system such as the 7-inch Nexus 7 and the likely swell of tablets that will appear with Windows 8, which will be optimized for touchscreens. There are important differences between the different tablets, from the size and aspect ratio of the screen to the most effective navigation schemes. This textbook will focus on the iPad, which remains the focal development platform for most tablet apps to date. But we intend for the strategies discussed to be applicable to virtually any tablet.
Before going further, I should add another note on nomenclature. We will often use the term app in this textbook to describe software applications for the tablet and, less frequently, mobile phone. There are a wide range of software options for news on the tablet: the native app, written in native code and sold in an app store; the HTML5 app, largely written in the language of the web but packaged in an app for distribution; the web app, visually and functionally similar to a native app but accessed as a website; and the tablet-optimized website, in which a website is customized for tablet viewing. We largely investigate native apps in this textbook, by far the most common way that news organizations are taking advantage of the tablet. As with hardware, however, our aim is to address the tablet use case in general, and the forthcoming tips should be able to adapt to any software solution.
There is a fascinating challenge in writing a textbook about storytelling for the iPad, and tablets generally. I am excited to take advantage of the tablet’s features with this textbook. A few tips for those new to iBooks’ “multi-touch textbooks”:
Another great reason to conceive this text as a digital textbook is that we can update it periodically and stay on top of the subject. As someone who has written traditional printed textbooks before, I know that it is frustrating to have an event dramatically impact a statement we have made, which is frozen permanently on the printed page. I will be excited to have this inability to change the text disappear with a digital textbook.
Having said that, my intention in writing this textbook is to provide a forum for discussion about this amazing platform that is the tablet. The segments that follow will be generous in philosophical discussions but will stop short of becoming how-to manuals. If there is one thing I have learned in more than four decades of work in our field, it is that no two projects are alike. That applies to the eleven tablet news apps I have worked on to date, too. There are, however, some principles that I believe apply to all, and we will discuss, analyze and present them fully to you here, allowing for those who are creating their own news apps to adopt those ideas that seem like a good fit.
I will conclude my introduction with three concepts crucial to this textbook:
Thank you for joining me in this new experience. I would love to hear your questions and comments and to learn about the tablet projects you are pursuing. E-mail me at mario@garcia-media.com and tweet me at @DrMarioRGarcia. I will also continue writing about tablet apps and other topics on my daily blog, http://garcia-media.com/blog.
Mario R. García
August 2012