Smart Mobile Storytelling – APME NewsTrain
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This presentation touches on how organizations can better serve mobile users without spending a lot of time (or budget). I presented it at Denton NewsTrain in September 2018 and Denver NewsTrain in April 2019.
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Smart Mobile Storytelling – APME NewsTrain
- 1. Smart Mobile Storytelling Christy Robinson Digital Coordinator, KERA @christyrobinson Help mobile users digest and discover your work
- 2. More U.S. adults now say they often get news on a mobile device (58 percent) than those who often get news on a desktop or laptop (39 percent). (Pew, July 2018)
- 3. Mobile traffic for KERA News 2018 traffic: Jan.1-July 31 138 percent increase since 2013:
- 4. 7 TIPS for better mobile stories
- 5. WHAT THESE 7 TIPS WILL DO >> Earn mobile users' trust and loyalty >> Increase click-throughs from social and search >> Encourage users to stay and explore
- 6. 1. Summarize
- 7. Kick off with a summary
- 8. 2. Break up all that text
- 9. 2. Break up all that text Lists Headings Bullet points Social embeds
- 10. Lists
- 11. Headings
- 12. Bullet points
- 13. Social embeds
- 14. 3. Go for the “what we know / what we don’t know” format
- 15. What we know / don’t know
- 16. 4. Explain
- 18. EXPLAIN Tooltips
- 19. Annotation
- 20. 5. Show, don’t (just) tell
- 21. 5. Show, don’t (just) tell Timelines Maps Charts + graphics 360 images/panorama
- 23. Animated map
- 27. BONUS! 360 tips • Experiment using your smartphone camera’s pano setting • Embed your pano image into a story: 360player, Roundme, or try the WP- VR-view plugin for Wordpress • On Facebook: groups/WomenInVR and groups/360.video.professionals
- 28. BONUS! 360+ tools Try Google Story Spheres Thinglink Google Tour Creator Beta: Knight Lab’s Scene tool Fyuse app
- 29. 6. Tell the story differently
- 30. 6. Tell the story differently Quizzes and games Newsletters Audio
- 32. MORE TOOLS! Create quizzes + games: Twine (twinery.org) for simple (or complex) games and other interactive, nonlinear stories. Open source. Qzzr.com for quizzes. $25/month after 14-day free trial. 4screens.net + SurveyMonkey for quizzes. Free or paid.
- 33. “What do you do first each day on your smartphone?” ReportLinker survey of 536 respondents, January 2017
- 34. Newsletters Here's what newsrooms get wrong all the time: taking a story and plopping it into an email. It doesn’t work like that. — Roy Schwartz, Axios president, ONA18
- 35. Newsletters Pick a goal: A traditional, linky launchpad? Standalone storytelling product? Both? Write in your human voice Create a launch process Pop-up emails
- 36. Audio storytelling Serial is “the podcast which introduced many people to the power of audio storytelling.” — Damian Radcliffe, journo prof, U of Oregon, on Medium Experiment with podcasting using the Anchor app For clips, try soundcite.knightlab.com
- 37. Let’s exercise! 1. Go to your website (on your phone!) 2. Choose a story. What would you change to make it friendlier for mobile? What would you add? How would you tell it differently? E.g. … • Bullet points • A map • Podcast/audio clips • Annotation • Social embeds • List • Newsletter series • Chart or infographic
- 38. Last, lucky #7! Optimize your stories for search + social
- 39. Pre-publishing checklist: Headlines (plural!) Internal links within the body At least one image with alt-text copy One heading or so for short stories, more for longer stories
- 40. Headlines
- 41. Headlines Good headline writing for search/social: I.D. the story’s main keyword or phrase and include it in the headline. Place it as close to the beginning of the headline as naturally possible. Aim for 60-63 characters for your search and social headlines (charactercountonline.com). .
- 42. Internal links Linking offers readers deeper exploration Provides clear paths for search bots Creates a tight-knit network of pages on your site Linking to other stories on your website strengthens its search value overall.
- 43. Internal links A (General) Guide! Short- to average- length stories: 2 or 3 links total Longer stories: A link every 2 to 3 swipes The related stories widget at the bottom doesn’t count!
- 44. Photo + alt text AKA alternative text, alt attributes, alt tags
- 45. Photo + alt text What alt text does: Provides better image context to our little buddies, the search engine crawlers Describes the image to visually impaired users
- 46. Headings For search engine spiders, headings organize your story and make it easier to understand. 2 reasons why putting headings in your story is GREAT: For users, they are like buoys in a ocean of text, navigating eyes down the page, making your story scan-friendly.
- 47. Headings 1. IF it’s natural, include your story’s main keyword or phrase in the heading. 3 tips for supercharged headings: 2. One heading for “short” stories, more for longer 3. Format your headings with the H2, H3 or H4 heading tag.
- 48. Let’s exercise! 1. Google this on your phone: site:[your website’s URL] Example — site:denverpost.com 2. Tap the News section. 3. Find two headlines that are cut off because of length. Write a second, shorter version for each.
- 49. What do you want to try first? Christy Robinson Digital Coordinator, KERA crobinson@kera.org @christyrobinson How can I help?
Editor's Notes
- Hi, everyone. I’m Christy Robinson, and I’m the digital coordinator at KERA, the PBS and NPR member station for North Texas. I’ve been there for two years. I work on a variety of digital projects with quite a variety of folks across the building, like in our TV, radio and Membership departments, and especially with our newsroom. The bulk of my professional background is digital journalism, but I also worked in digital marketing for a just a bit. During my career, I’ve worked mostly in social, search, audience engagement and growth, along with straight-up writing and web editing. I’m happy to be here talking with you about what makes a story work for mobile readers. … First, I want us to kick off with a quick exercise.
- Mobile has been the primary gateway to the internet for a few years now, and frequent news consumption on mobile is now happening at almost 20 percentage points more than on desktop or laptop.
- That finding echoes the mobile traffic growth for KERA News over the past five years. Since 2013, our desktop and mobile traffic have done quite the flip-flop.
- So how can we ensure our storytelling keeps up with the increase in mobile news consumption? Let’s go over 7 ways you can tell stories better for an audience viewing stories on small, handheld devices.
- But what will these 7 tips do for you? Here are the 3 functions of these 7 tips.
- Kicking off your story with a summary is one of the easiest, simplest way to serve mobile users. Many types of coverage benefit from summary, but especially stories where users might need further clarity for what this story even is — like it’s a dense topic, or the story’s significance isn’t readily apparent from just the headline. You need a good summary or subhed to inform mobile users fast and earn their read and their share. This setup is pretty old; newspapers have used subheds for ages. But in the age of the small screen, fast, additional information can be the difference between a user staying and reading and sharing, or bouncing out because it’s too much work to get an adequate gist of the story.
- No 2 — break up all that text with what I call text-busters: lists, headings, bullet points and social embeds. Mobile users on occasion will scan a story first before committing. If all they see is an ocean of black and white text, it’s difficult to make an assessment. Text busters give eyes an anchor, an additional clue what the story is about. Also, mobile usage tends to happen in bites throughout the day, so think in bites and portions when you’re structuring your stories, too.
- Stories that inherently are just separate-but-related chunks of information do great laid out as a list. To get the most out of this structure, state in the headline how MANY points the story will be making. THEN be sure to echo that in the story by numbering each point within. Too many stories only do this structure half-justice – they’ll list “5 facts,” then not include numbers with each heading. If I have to come back to the story later, it’s easier for me to remember that I was reading point No. 2 than to have to go searching through the body for the last words I remember reading. Also, if this headline had just said “Facts to know about migrant family reunification,” and I saw it out on social, I probably would have kept on scrolling by. Just TELL me how many facts I’m in for. is it 3 facts? 33 facts? Respect my time by telling me up front what to expect.
- Headings make a story more scannable. They signal pivots in the story along the way, in addition to simply breaking up all that black and white text on a small screen. Consider at least one heading for short stories and more for longer. … Headings are important for a couple of different reasons, actually. We’ll touch on them again a bit later.
- The trusty, old fashioned bullet point is not used nearly enough in news, especially when the story is NOT enhanced by including those points within a traditional narrative. There is no reason to stuff multiple items in a series into a paragraph, especially if those items ARE the point of the story. For instance, this BuzzFeed News story from back in September. Chances are high that I would not wade into a paragraph thick with names, job titles and semi-colons. So, consider separating out the nuts and bolts from the narrative, where you can focus on writing about context and impact.
- First of all, if you’ve never embedded a social post into a story before and aren’t sure how to, please come see me afterward and I’ll be happy to show you. It’s easy but not immediately intuitive. This story is from KERA’s new Mental Health beat about the growth of therapist referral sites that focus on people of color and why that’s important. The tweets embedded in this story not only help break up a long column of text, they add additional human voices that help show the impact of the story’s subject. I embedded just tweets here, but you can do the same with public Facebook posts and Instagram posts, too.
- Structuring a story by sectioning it up into "what we know" and "what we don't know yet” is a fast, scannable form for mobile users in a developing news situation. There are plenty of outlets that do the “what we know” structure, but I really appreciate when a story also pairs that with a complementing “what we don’t know” section, too, and here’s why: I think that bit of transparency sends a trust signal: Up front, we're copping to the information we can’t get or simply don’t have yet. It isn’t like structuring your story into “what we know and don’t know” will solve the epic media trust problem we find ourselves in, but I believe it’s one of the many transparent mini-signals we can send the public.
- Let’s look at a couple of better ways to explain thick subjects or tricky terminology for mobile audiences:
- Tooltips are basically an on-page, interactive glossary. This is a story from our Race to Save Failing Schools series, where we profiled several schools in North Texas that were failing according to the state’s standards. Education has so many government acronyms, policy definitions and industry concepts — we wanted a way to deliver such explanations easily and quickly without bogging down the storytelling pace. Our developer created a tooltip function to achieve this. This is on our special projects site, stories dot kera dot org, which is Wordpress. If your site happens to be Wordpress like this one, there are many tooltip plugins to install and use; a popular one is called Simple Tooltips. If your CMS isn’t Wordpress, talk to your developer, digital team or an editor to see what options exist for your website.
- I love web annotation. There are several ways to pull this off, but this example from the Washington Post uses Genius Web Annotator. You might remember Genius as Rap Genius, which crowd-sources interpretations of rap lyrics. NOW the web annotator offers a small bit of javascript code or a Wordpress plugin to run annotations on websites. The author annotates his/her own article, and users can comment on those annotations. Like tooltips, annotations are great for offering explanations and insight without bogging down the story itself.
- There are a lot of ways to do this and we’re going to look a handful of ways to show and not just tell … -----. If the experience of reading your story is dependent on imagining a location, or increases and decreases, or a hop through multiple events during a specific time frame — it’s much easier to give users a visual than you might think.
- Here are a couple of uses of the open source and really easy to use timeline tool by the Knight Lab at Northwestern University. It’s been around a while and it’s the most popular of Knight Lab’s open source tools that it created for media outlets to use. It’s approachable, beautiful on mobile and is a really handy helper for telling your story to mobile audiences. — ON THE LEFT IS A NON-NEWS EXAMPLE: In addition to being an NPR member station, KERA is also a PBS member station, so we are a TV station too. Last year we celebrated the 50th anniversary of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and Fred Rogers Productions used Knight Lab’s timeline tool to show users a quick history of the TV show as well as the show’s transition into Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood. The Fred Rogers company shared the timeline with me so I could embed it on a 50th anniversary promotion page that I created for the station. — ON THE RIGHT IS AN EXAMPLE OF NEWS USE, BY CNN: It’s a story about North Korean nuclear ambitions. The timeline gives digestible, browsable historical context on the subject. I haven’t run into a better timeline tool, especially not a free one.
- Let’s look at two types of maps. First is an animated map. … There are a lot of ways to include an embedded map in your story, the most tried and true way is to create and embed a Google map. But what if the location aspect of your story is more complex? This map was created by a former designer of ours at KERA. It’s in a story from a series of ours “One Crisis Away: Still on the Financial Edge,” where we profiled a handful of folks in North Texas who are making it financially, but barely and with great difficulty. .. One of those profile subjects was a guy who has 3-hour, one-way public transportation and walking commute from home to work each day. We wanted to use a map to show how insane his commute is. (This clip here just shows a part of his commute. We made this into a video, so it’s on Youtube and mobile users can just turn their phones sideways to view it). But you don’t have to be a designer or even work with a designer to create a similar experience.
- Story maps! I love them. If you haven’t experimented with this Knight Lab tool yet, please do. It’s another free tool that helps you tell stories that highlight the locations of a series of events. It’s kind of like a blend of a timeline and an interactive map. It lets you combine mapping with text, images, and multimedia content. They make it really easy to harness maps and geography to help tell your story.
- There are so many ways to make charts, so I’ll just focus on the one we use most frequently at KERA News. For our Race to Save Failing Schools series, we decided to dedicate one whole story to the numbers behind school failure. We use an online tool called Infogram, and it makes creating charts and infographics really easy. You can embed them as an interactive chart like in this story, or download them as a static image. You can do simple graphics or full-fledge infographics with infogram, too, in addition to basic map visualizations. There is a free plan and a $19/month plan, with the main difference being the number of charts and graphics you’re allowed to make. At $67 a month, you can use your own organization’s branding, plus other benefits. But free is definitely the way to go in order to play around and get your feet wet.
- 360-degree images and mobile go beautifully together. This story is another one from our Race to Save Failing Schools project. The series broke down the schools from so many angles, including the finances, staffing and changing demographics. We wanted to also show an immersive view of each school as the students see it when they approach the front doors each day. Audiences are becoming more accustomed to viewing location-rich stories in an interactive way, and it’s more approachable than ever to take these sorts of images.
- Let’s talk 360 real quick, because this is an area that, if you’ve got a later-edition smartphone, you can start playing with this kind of photography and make an immediate difference in your mobile storytelling. — First, if you’re not sure what 360 is about, I’d like to clear up any confusion. Think of the panorama setting on your smartphone’s camera. You might just choose to take an extra wide shot with that setting, or you might twirl all the way around — if you do, you’ve got yourself a rudimentary but serviceable 360 image. That’s what we’re talking about. +There 360 cameras at a variety of price points, but your smartphone camera’s pano setting works fine as well. +You can’t just upload that panorama photo from your phone’s photo album into a story. It will just look like a wide, skinny, warped picture. You need to include a viewer in your story so that the image can be seen on a web page the way it was intended. Loads of viewers have exploded on the scene in the past year. These are just a few that are free or low-cost. +If you’re interested in exploring what others are doing in this space, there are some great groups on Facebook, like Women In VR and 360 Video Professionals.
- You don’t have to stop at just a 360 photo. There are free tools that allow you to also embed audio touch points and other media. These are some fun, easy and cheap or free ways to experiment with a little extra immersion. -- Google Story Spheres and Thinglink enhance your 360 images by allowing you to position those multimedia touch points throughout different scenes. -- Google is on it with the immersive tools for experimentation. Check out Tour Creator. It makes it easy to create 360 tours of a location. Like Story Spheres and Thinglink, you can also embed multimedia throughout. Tour Creator reminds me of a cross between Story Spheres and Knight Lab’s Story Map. -- Speaking of Knight Lab, their VR/360 Scene tool has been in Beta for a while, and I can’t wait to get my hands on it when it’s ready. They promise that it will be extra approachable. Look it up and check out their progress so far. You can give them your email address and they’ll ping you when the tool is ready for use. -- The image on the right was created with the Fyuse app. This is a story on KERA’s arts news site, Art and Seek dot org. It’s about a 1937 Cord Cabriolet that was part of Precisionism exhibit at the Dallas Museum of Art. This isn’t the kind of car you wan to just see a flat image of, so our videographer quickly took this image of it with the Fyuse app. It blends the ability to create 360 images and spatial photography … that just means it makes the image three-dimensional, giving it a little more depth. Just because our videographer did this doesn’t mean it’s unapproachable. On the contrary – I’ve played with it and it’s really easy. And you can also embed these images right into your story.
- Let’s look at a couple of ways to tell your story entirely differently altogether.
- Let’s look at a few ways to tell your story entirely different altogether.
- I like Buzzfeed News’ quiz that tests users’ knowledge on what headlines are real or fake from a given week. It’s a fun twist on the traditional “top headlines” news roundup. On the right -- New York Times keeps getting traction out of this 2013 quiz about dialect. In fact it was their most popular piece of content that year, and it’s not even a traditional article. They could have done a standard story on dialect differences, but choosing an alternative form worked great in this case. This quiz has a lot of evergreen return.
- Here are a few tools for trying out game and quizz creation. The example on the right was Financial Time’s most engaging story of 2017, it was game that takes readers through a few days of trying to make money as an Uber driver.
- Ok, let’s check out a little factoid … A ReportLinker survey found that the very first thing respondents do when they look at their phone for the first time each day is a tie between check email and get on social media. Email continues to be a dominant digital space for smartphone users. But …
- Too many newsrooms are are solely using this format to blast links at people. Depending on your goal for a particular newsletter, email doesn’t have to be something that pushes another product — it can be its own product, a standalone product, one where the goal is to build intimacy and loyalty instead of solely serving as a jump-off point to your website. Email is among the top news products with the potential to build relationships with readers.
- Want to launch a new newsletter? Here are some points to think about. Decide on a goal: It can be a traditional roundup of a bunch of links to your site, but you sacrifice intimacy. Your goal can be to build intimacy by providing a contained experience right there in the user’s inbox, but you sacrifice website traffic. Or you can mix it up and do both. But above all … Email can and should be written differently from your standard news voice. Think of this as a one on one conversation. It might be a newsletter that’s branded with your organization’s name and logo, but consider making the email from an individual reporter, editor, or a rotating newsroom cast, where the individual signs off as his or herself. Email is a product, so create a step by step process for deciding whether or not to launch one. It will also help keep newsroom politics out of the decision. One of the launch criteria should be for the newsletter to not create any overlap with another existing newsletter. Make sure it’s different from anything else you already offer. Consider pop-up emails: Recipients sign up for a limited-run newsletter that might last three days, five days, a month, depending on what the occasion is. The newsletter will come from one particular reporter or different members of a reporting team during, for instance, a political campaign or a conference. It’s very human, personal correspondence to help the recipients feel like they’re there on the ground, with the reporter.
- Ah, Serial. When its first season aired in 2014, it was the first podcast I binged-listened to. Podcasting had been around, but Serial was a turning point. I have about a 35-mile one-way commute to work. Some of the best journalism I consume, I consume with my ears. Sadly, I know many more journalists who want to start a podcast than those who have launched one. if you’ve been wanting to test the podcasting waters, download the Anchor app. It’s got a great interface and it’s easy to use. You can create a podcast right there on their robust network, you can borrow and even remix others’ audio to create something new, or you can simply use it to create an audio soundbite to embed in your story. Speaking of audio clips, if you haven’t played with Knight Lab’s free sound cite tool, that’s a really easy way to incorporate audio into your story as a supporting element, too, offering users a quick listen of a story subject speaking, or a particularly interesting ambient sound from a location. BEFORE PROCEEDING TO TIP NUMBER 7, LET’S PAUSE FOR AN EXCERCISE.
- The interests of social, search and mobile create a perfect trifecta. You might have a point person in the newsroom whose job it is to focus on digital projects and engagement around your organization’s journalism. Your newsroom might even have an entire team of 50 people. But they do not have the bandwidth to optimize each and every story every day. When they DO spend time giving a basic digital treatment to your stories, they’re going backward; they’re doing retroactive work instead of moving your story forward. Take charge of these four daily digital basics – consider them your pre-publishing checklist.. In addition to making your stories stronger for social and search, you’ll be able to participate in larger newsroom conversations about how to reach digital goals because you understand optimization basics.
- Here is your 4-point pre-publishing checklist.
- Your story will have its main headline. But your CMS probably has other fields for multiple headline versions. The headline on your story may describe your story perfectly, but it also might be so long that it truncates, or cuts off, when your story is shared on social, cutting off important keywords or context and robbing social users of the information they need to decide to take an action. If the main headline is just fine for the website but it’s too long for search, or it could be more compelling for social, locate those alternate title fields in your story’s text editor and craft a different version. This is our 10-year-old niche Tellyspotting blog, run by our VP of television Bill Young. It’s all about British TV. Bill is everyone’s favorite person at the station. He’s clever and sometimes comes up with some jaunty, fun headlines. But many times those kind of headlines don’t work out on social and search. Sometimes a much more straightforward approach is the key. If your CMS has an alternate headline field for social and search, and you feel like your on-page headline might not work as well when displayed out the wild, take a minute to craft one that will.
- So what does make a good headline for mobile users on search and social? 1. Don't use a less-used synonym or euphemism, even if it makes for a really clever and punny headline. 2. If your headline is a tad too long, at least the main keyphrase won’t be cut off. 3. Feel free to take this average rule of thumb, to make the process more streamlined. If your CMS’s headline fields don’t include a character counter, use a Google or Word doc, or an online tool like charactercountonline.com until you get good at eyeballing
- Adding links to your other work or your collegues’ work within your story serves two masters: no. 1, the reader; and no. 2, search engine.
- -- The related links widget at the bottom of the story is great, but it assumes mobile users will make it all the way to the bottom. -- Here’s the main reason internal links are important: Mobile users bounce out of stories at a higher rate than desktop users. If they’re going to bounce away from your story, internal links at least gives them an avenue for staying on your site and exploring something else. -- The way Google makes decisions about what articles to serve up to searchers is a thick, mysterious soup of factors. But a positive signal to Google is when a searcher has clicked through on your story, then at some point that user clicks on a link to go more deeply into your site. That signals to Google that their customer, the searcher, is being taken care of, that the searcher is interested in what’s on your site.
- Search engine robots have gotten better about “seeing” images, but they’re still pretty terrible at it. You could have interviewed the governor and your story includes a photo of him. But Google bots might interpret that photo as a “man with a tie” instead how you WANT Google to categorize it — as the actual governor. The “alternative text” field is where you explicitly tell them what or who your image is of. So don’t leave it blank! For alt text, you really just need a “sufficiently descriptive” amount of text. But if you’re in a hurry, it’s better to copy and paste the whole caption into the alt text field than to leave it blank. As long as your caption explicitly states what’s in the photo and what’s going on, double-use your caption.
- — Alt text is the primary way Google makes sense of your image and connects its context to that of your story. — Most importantly, it’s an accessibility feature. It offers a good experience for users who can’t see the image, including users who are visually impaired. It also offers descriptions for users who disable images in their web browser for connectivity or security reasons.
- Headings are another element of your story that serve both the reader and search. — Google has said headings are helpful in better organizing and understanding your story for search engine spiders, or crawlers, or bots, whatever your preferred term. — And again, headings act like visual anchors, or buoys in a sea of text, to reinforce your story’s point and help the user travel down the page more clearly.
- Here are my top three tips for headings: — First, if it’s natural, work in the story’s main idea or keyword into at least one of the headings, if you sense a natural opportunity. But don’t force it. — How many headings is good? My personal guideline is one heading for short stories and more for longer ones. Wherever there is a natural break or transition in thought. — Lastly: You CAN bold your headings. Better yet, try formatting them with the H2, H3 or H4 tags instead. In your CMS, they might be labeled Heading 1, heading 2, etc. They’re likely located in a drop-down menu near your other formatting options, like bold, italics, etc.
- Ok! One last exercise to reinforce good mobile headline writing. PULL UP YOUR PREFERRED MOBILE BROWSER ON YOUR SMARTPHONE. In your browser’s URL bar, which functions as a search field as well, type this: …
- Thanks, everyone.