Stories are everywhere, from newspapers to TV drama, fact to fiction. By deconstructing stories into fundamental, structured building blocks we can present them in new and powerful ways.
We can make experiences that vary the length of the story, let you explore it from different directions, summarise and recap it, change the media used to present it, adapt it to what you already know or personalise it to make it more relevant. And we can create truly responsive content that dynamically adapts to your device and context.
Through two case studies at the BBC, mobile news and a drama serial, I'll look at how we took a data-driven but user-centred approach to structuring and designing stories that resulted in novel experiences. The primary building blocks we use in our work are storylines, key moments and people. The storyline might be the epic journey of a character, the events in a refugee crisis or a love triangle. The essential moments and events in these storylines could be the bits people remember most fondly, the key to understanding or the jumping off points to other stories. Yet the key people or characters are almost always the most important part of a story to the audience.
2. “Data is just stuff, or rather, structured stuff: The cells of a spreadsheet,
the structure of a Word document, computer programs themselves—all
data”
- Paul Ford (@ftrain) I Dreamed of a Perfect Database
3. Structured stuff about stories
Split stories into re-usable components
Structure and label the components
Stories + Data = New things
20. Some challenges
How do we make structured stories?
What kind of stories work best?
What’s the best experience?
21. Structured stories
Split stories into re-usable components
Structure and label the components
Stories + Data = New things in a fragmented media world
tristan.ferne@bbc.co.uk or @tristanf
Editor's Notes
Data. like this quote says, it’s just structured stuff.
I’m going to talk about structured stuff for stories
By that I mean
splitting stories into small, re-usable components
And structuring them with data so you know when and where to use them
And then putting the stories back together again in interesting ways to make new things
I’m going to talk about two kinds of stories today - drama and news - and what we've been prototyping in R&D
My first attempts at structured stories were with TV and radio drama
Last year we started working with Home Front, a daily Radio 4 drama, who were nice enough to let us play around with their programme (and also had a 10-year worldwide rights deal)
using lots of spreadsheets we took two series of programmes & split them up into storylines, events or scenes, characters and places
For each scene we also chopped out the audio from the programme and wrote a quick summary so we had a self-contained "atom" of media for every scene
Here's one storyline about an illicit relationship
but there's not just one storyline, there are many other intersecting storylines in the series
Just think of your favourite soap, or Game of Thrones, or War & Peace. Modern TV drama is becoming more complex.
So what?
Have you ever watched a drama and gone "Who was that? what?" or you can't remember what happened in the last series...
We thought there was a space to make something to help catch-up, recap and understanding
Demo of [http://homefront.ch.bbc.co.uk]
So we turned that story data into a website, the story explorer
Here’s it is, a new way to consume linear drama
It's not a replacement for listening, but if you want to quickly catchup or remind yourself what happens…
Catch up by storyline - listen ot just read and skim
Find out about characters while you do
and that's all driven by structured story data
We piloted it over last summer on Taster and it went down really well with the audience - some were new to it and used it to get into the story, some just wanted a recap on bits they’d missed. Some even used it as a radio - listening to whole storylines for hours.
We’re now designing a mobile-first, TV drama prototype
What about stories in news?
This is the inverted pyramid of journalism, which suggests you should normally lead with the most important info at the top, getting less and less important to the end,
originally it was so editors could cut a column from the bottom to fit the space available in the newspaper.
That's structure
And remember Ceefax!
those 4 paras became the Top Four in News online' Content Prodcution System so every news online article starts with this structure
And of course, there's lots of tagging articles
This is the structure we’re been using for news, the “Storyline” model,
Storylines are made up of events
And each event can be linked to people, organisations and places
(As you can see, it looks awfully similar to the drama model)
This is the story of Alexis Tsipras’s resignation and the Greek debt crisis
News stories are normally fairly narratively straightforward but it is complicated what we mean by a story, where do they start or end? The resignation fits into the bailout which fits into the debt crisis which fits into the Eurozone... where do they intersect? Really interesting, but I don’t have time for that!
But the BBC doesn’t just do news in one way, we do it with text, TV, video, radio…
which can all be linked to this structure
That’s a lot of structured story for us to play with
Here’s the same story in Vivo, the news content management system, which we are using for some experiments
We've just broken the story into posts representing events, then hung more detail off each one
This is why I think this is important
In the world of the internet, there are more and more new things, devices, platforms and places to get media and news…
From Google AMP to Facebook Instant Stories, from Line to Vine, from Apple Watch to WhatsApp, chatbots to Snapchat, podcasts to push notifications.
So the audience is increasingly elsewhere, not watching our channels or browsing our website
But rather than create more and more stuff for each of these new platforms piecemeal as they appear
if we structure our news stories into small, reusable pieces then we can use them in all these new places, formats and devices
That makes structured stories very powerful
Here’s a few things we’ve prototyped on top of these structured news stories. It's what my team does - we sketch things, prototype them, test them with real users
There's a card-based app, an expanding video story, lots of sketches...
This is what we’ve taken furthest, we call it Atomised News. It aims to use these structured stories to create a new service for mobile and young audiences.
[VIDEO]
You can just skim the the key events of the story
and you can dig into the ones that interest you
Plus we have definitions of the key people, organisations and places, if you need it
We based this on BBC research saying that the young audience find BBC news quite inaccessible & need easier ways into it, (but once there they find it useful)
It has tested well so far, making sense as a format, and proving useful for quickly reading a story on a mobile, presentation appealed - media rich, split up,
looking at trialling it soon
This is just a start on structured stories for news. What else might we do?
Structured stories might make things more efficient, let us scale to more places
We could re-use components at different times and in different formats
We could publish components in many places around the internet
We could use components for alerts and updates to stories
(And just to point out that the Instafax - the original BBC news on Instagram using the top 4 - was one of our inspirations)
It's not just re-using things either...
An app could choose the appropriate amount of content for its screen, whether it's the latest smartphone or watch or whatever’s next…
Adapt the media to your context - maybe switching from video to audio when you lose 3G, or adding captions when you mute your phone
And change the length or even change the language
[Demo of http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2015-11-forecaster-our-experimental-object-based-weather-forecast]
This is R&D’s Forecaster demo - it is an atomised weather forecast, split into component parts of the map, the presenter, the subtitles, the signing - and then can combine any of these elements to your preferences or screen size
We could personalise the news - and only show you what you don't already know about a story
Another of our inspirations, Circa, was built from atomised stories and would track what you’d read and only show you the updates.
Another BBC R&D experiment from Ian Forrester (who talked earlier) called Perceptive Media even adapts the story and presentation to what it knows about you.)
Here are some challenges, for us and for you
How do we structure our stories and create this data?
What are the best tools we can make to help?
How would it change the newsroom and production workflow?
Can we use algorithms to generate this structure automatically?
What stories and areas and media does this best work for?
So far we've concentrated on text and explainer-type articles of complex news stories for news, and drama
Can we tell our stories effectively enough like this? Can it be as good as hand-crafted articles and long-form TV programmes?
Both Atomised News and the Story Explorer have taken stories, split them up, added data and put them back together
They are structured stories with a simple and useful experience layered on top
We're going to keep looking at how to present and tell the same stories in different ways
Because we think this could be an essential approach for the BBC as media and technology continues to evolve
LINKS
http://homefront.ch.bbc.co.uk
http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2015-06-home-front-story-explorer
http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2015-09-elastic-news-on-a-mobile
http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2015-11-forecaster-our-experimental-object-based-weather-forecast
http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2015-12-visual-perceptive-media-gets-people-talking
