Invisible Inkling

Ryan Sholin on the future of newspapers, online news and journalism education.

All About storytelling

Inventing journalism

February 17, 2008 – 11:13 am

I’ve been reading Guns, Germs & Steel for months now.
(I take these bound paper items you people call ‘books’ slowly sometimes.)
There’s a number of striking stories about technology, innovation, and invention in the chapter I’m in the middle of right now. One of those stories is about the QWERTY keyboard layout, which was actually [...]

Five ways to innovate today

November 28, 2007 – 6:29 am

A colleague looking for a few new ways to integrate free Web services into his newsroom asked me to chip in with a list of five, so here they are. A note to student journalists: These are all free and easy ways to get something new and different online, and they probably serve a [...]

Make me cry.

November 17, 2007 – 9:47 am

I’ve been repeating versions of this on recent training rounds when folks ask about learning Flash, so I thought I’d post it here for reference and credit purposes…
Richard Koci Hernandez, near the end of a great Starter Kit page at Multimedia Shooter:
“Soundslides or Flash? Put it this way, if you don’t know what Soundslides is, [...]

The eleventh obvious thing: Your subscribers are dying

July 16, 2007 – 6:44 am

Here’s a newsroom exercise sure to drive a stake of fear squarely into the heart of your circulation manager:
Count the number of obituaries printed in your paper in the last year for local residents over the age of 60.
Now compare that number to your paper’s drop in circulation over the same period.
If you see a [...]

The full effect: Shooting, packaging and telling a multimedia story

February 25, 2007 – 10:33 am

I believe one of the goals multimedia storytelling should be to communicate in a web-native format, using stills, audio, video, graphics, and interactivity to draw readers into a story they wouldn’t have read if it were just printed text on a page — or a screen.
Would I have any interest in this train story in [...]