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ACJ Newsline
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Sangita Rajan
4:31
Hello and welcome to the live blog hosted by the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai on a panel discussion about innovations in storytelling.
4:33
On the panel with us are Elise Hu, technology and culture reporter at NPR; Douglas McGray, editor-in-chief of Pop-Up Magazine; Kara Oehler, co-founder and editor-in-chief of Zeega; and Joe Sexton, senior editor at ProPublica. Moderated by Dorothy Wickenden, NF '89, executive editor of The New Yorker, and introducing them will be Tim Golden, NF '96.
4:40
The discussion has kicked off with the Moderator, Dorothy Wickenden, who tells us that by the end of this session, the audience will get insight into the future of storytelling.
4:41
4:43
She introduces the audience to Joe Sexton and asks him to tell the panel about his project 'Snowfall'
4:47
Joe takes over the stage and says, "We all love ticktoks, you can really make a TikTok with an extraordinary issue. I have some storytelling challenges."
4:48
Dorothy pops in with a question about the readability of 'snowfall'. She says, "as a reader I thought the design is totally beautiful, but was quite distracted with what to read and what to see, so how you suggest viewers to look at it?"
4:50
Joe explains that investigative stories can be presented with quite a lot of flexibility
4:51
Dorothy asks how challenging investigative journalism is when he has to embed visuals into them
4:52
He says that the idea moved him. "We can show it with animations when visuals can't come in"
4:53
The moderator now introduces the panel to Elise Hu who is the technology and culture reporter at NPR
4:56
Elise starts by talking about NPR and then plays a video presentation that represents the kind of videos that conceptualizes news in real time.
She adds that she got the idea to do this from a VH1 pop up show
4:57
When they began doing this exercise, Elise says that they did not have an audience at all.
4:58
She goes on to say that now newsrooms have become more operational. "We have certain deadlines and some productions. We end up with great things 20% of the time"
4:59
5:00
Douglas McGray, the editor-in-chief of Pop-Up Magazine comes into the discussion by saying that he stumbled onto radio by accident while he was working as a writer at a magazine.
5:01
The Moderator asks him how he is doing with limited audience and come up with a mixed multimedia platform and curated the pop-up show.
5:02
Douglas says, "I was close up to the world in which I could do things by accident and where there's no use of writers" He looks back to the time when he realised that we are in the middle of an integrated newsroom and the thought of 'what if' popped into his mind. He thought about what the magazine could do with this new platform.
5:05
"One could be we would have sound system, we could have writers, photographers, illustrators. So that was the first ideal thought. I would call it pop up magazine, and wanted to make something that would feel that way." he adds.
5:06
He remembers that it very quickly got out of hand. With each issue they published, they found ways to integrate multimedia elements. And so it started all together and made it as one show
5:07
Dorothy asks him to throw some light on how the performance was when they brought in a photographer to the table.
5:08
Douglas says that the structure of the news is providing table content. "There is feature news and when we approach people asking what they would want to do, we just say we don't want more we just want fiction with sound image. So we asked the legendary photographer this question he said we would do something on my favourite piece of writing that he saw in one of my photographs."
5:11
Joe tells us about the presentation made by the photographer in detail. "So he came out, and we presented it, and he was ready to tell the story. It switched to an image of the letter, and then he stopped talking and a voice appeared. We asked the inmate to read the letter aloud. He stepped back from the mike. The audience filled the room. For 3 or 4 minutes everyone sat in silence and there is an environment of prison and how internet disconnected everyone."
5:12
He tells that the experience was surreal and there was something vivid about it. Part of it was very magical, and they had discussions about if they should record it on film.
5:14
Dorothy asks Douglas that when people talk about The New Yorker and his audience there for a short period of time, how does it impact?
He responds to her and says that there is a though about who is the audience and who is watching it. The real question is if it is a good experience.
5:16
He tells the audience that they wanted to take his idea of storytelling and insert it into popular culture. Not recording it would mean that they had to worry about the audience's attention being split.
5:18
"We are careful not do something the same story till it comes out. Sometimes a story book will take people  4 years. In that sense we see books come out and people sharing bits and pieces of it" he adds.
5:19
He says that people have been pitching new and exciting ideas and a lot of pieces have been in the pipeline. He says "it's like visiting an open studio or something"
5:20
Dorothy now introduces the panel to Kara Oehler, the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Zeega. She asks her to tell more about Zeega.
5:23
Kara says that it all began with a road trip.
5:25
She tells us that they created a map of images and videos. "The clips get shorter and from there we started zeega as people don't have much knowledge about coding. A lot of people get their news on social media, so we collaborated with a news channel."
5:27
She tells us that this is basically a newscast for the Internet.
5:28
She presents a video and shows the audience a GIF, which is a shorter looped video played along with some information.
5:30
The moderator asks her how this is helpful for those in business
5:32
Kara tells the audience that it helps people in the business world a lot because she has seen a lot of beautiful pieces that have been curated.
5:33
And that concludes our discussion of the innovative forms of storytelling. Thank you for being with us. Please turn in for updates and more blogs.
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