Gistory: A case study Zahra Rasool, Gistory: Building audience from scratch through
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Zahra Rasool is a graduate student at the Missouri School of Journalism. She is also the executive director and founder of Gistory, an Internet startup that aims to provide complete, concise and contextual news briefs on an interactive world map. Rasool started Gistory while she was working on her master’s degree. The startup is partly funded by the Reynolds Journalism Institute. Rasool is working on a documentary about women in rural India who are striving to bring about change in their local communities. She received the $12,000 O.O. McIntyre Fellowship, which is the highest postgraduate award given by the Missouri School of Journalism to work on her film. Prior to founding Gistory, she spent nine months with Al Jazeera English in Washington D.C. as an intern and fellow. Rasool is originally from Mumbai, India.
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Gistory: A case study Zahra Rasool, Gistory: Building audience from scratch through
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Editor's Notes
- All about location
- Issues identified
- Identified three needs to meet these problems. Gistory’s founding principles
- Deciding whether or not to come back to Mizzou
- Basic starting points: • Show events on a map • Target audience 16-35 • Accessible, easy-to-use • User-driven (user makes choices, we allow them to be in the driver’s seat)
- Then, as a team, address these two big questions – HOW do we make this concept into a working reality? And WHY would someone choose Gistory? What is it about this specific concept?
- When back in Columbia, needed… – to secure funding – to generate content – to assemble a team – to create identity
- Got a team of students together at Mizzou
- And then together, the team set out to figure out how to engage an audience
- (Avery) Zahra approached me in September with the general concept, outlined those “starting points,” and asked me to create a founding identity for the company. Combine the trust and respectability of the New York Times with the social-savvy of digital publications like BuzzFeed and Mashable… AVOID THE WORD NEWS! Story instead.
- Zahra said, I want this to be totally different than traditional online news sites. “News” isn’t even appropriate anymore. Instead of thinking of digital media publication as something rigid, rectangular, in measured columns and grids, “news” with the negative, cold connotations, this company is going to be something completely different. What are you communicating through use of traditional news format? I’m the only one on the team coming from a background that’s not journalism, business, or computer programming. Coming from a literature and art history background – when you close read a poem, you must separate the content from the form and understand what the form itself is communicating before working on the content. So in poetry, writers use rhyme to draw connections between two words that aren’t necessarily connected. Use meter to structure the rhythm and change how the reader interacts with the content. So let’s do the same thing to digital news. We’ve got a traditional newspaper. We’ve got an online news site. What is the form, specifically, communicating? Because these have the same form. You click on a story headline, you’re turning the page of your physical newspaper. Two major things: This clearly highlights the amazing potential being lost by retrofitting modern digital platforms to provide the exact same function as traditional newspapers. Everyone already knows this. The pervasive nature of grids and columns. Why are we so intent to impose order and control onto the events happening around us? Humans like rigidity. Humans like predictability. Humans like the feeling of control that comes with these externally imposed structures. ********I WILL CLEAN THIS UP MORE LATER
- By using geography as the basis for organization, events aggregate organically. View connections as they appear, rather than impose our own structure onto the events. Get users, people who live these events, to contribute their voices and views…
- But we needed a name before I could make an identity. Talk about it here….
- Created a logo emphasizing both the “gist” and “story” aspects of Gistory. (Movement, but stability. Talk about type? Not enough time) Created a color palette optimized for screen – broad enough variety to be able to combine each color in many ways. With the addition of our “Know news better” tagline, these elements are the foundational blocks on which I’ve built all subsequent visuals, from our early recruitment posters (which you might still be able to see out in the hallways), to our social media posts, to this presentation, and, of course, to our site itself, keeping in mind the entire time Gistory’s three core principles: Complete, Concise, Contextual.
- HYPHEN TO THE RESCUE.