This week, Corinne Podger takes us through best practice in mobile journalism and digital storytelling, and how varying mobile consumption habits affect the journalism in different territories.
In the news round-up, the team discuss Quartz’s sale, a mixed bag of news for UK newspapers, and The Beast Inside. Chris flubs the outro, see if you can tell.
We’re reading:
- The Guardian finds less polished video works better on Instagram Stories, via Digiday
- Tell me more: The Globe and Mail is slipping a little extra context into its stories (while explaining its editorial thinking along the way), via Nieman Lab
In our own words: Peter Houston
The phrase ‘Thought Leader’ gets bandied about way too much. But speaking with Corinne Podger this week for the podcast I really got the sense that she has been thinking and talking about digital storytelling for a long time.
Corinne is set to start teaching Digital and Mobile Journalism at the University of Melbourne and has been training journalists around the world for the past five years or so. She worked previously in newspapers, radio and TV for organisations including The ABC and the BBC World Service.
Her focus on digital storytelling is refreshingly practical, with one eye firmly fixed on the ‘How To’, perfectly embodied in her work on the Mobile Journalism Manual. But she is also thinking bigger picture, asking trainees to think about how they use the content they create to tell better stories.
“The core thing for me with training is to get across the concept of a digital mindset. It’s not the content that you have, it’s what you do with it once you have it.”
She explains that an audio file is not just an audio file, it’s a .MP3 and that means you can put it into a video editing program, put a picture on top and suddenly you’ve turned radio into video. Image files are JPGs that can be animated, have text overlaid or re-formatted for desktop, mobile or social media.
Corinne’s Media Choices pick is incredibly illustrative of her belief that great digital storytelling comes from clever thinking around available assets. She pointed us at a Twitter thread from Gabrielle Bluestone at Vice telling the story of the first months of Trump’s Presidency framing links to news reports with the lyrics of Bruce Springsteen’s Atlantic City.
To see what she means, fire up The Boss on YouTube and work through Twitter thread in time to the music.
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