This sweet old man and his model of the UT Tower may not be a strategic priority, but they make a great story.

As managing editor of a higher education alumni magazine and news blog, I spend a lot of time thinking about story ideas. What are those brilliant topics/people/photographs/insights that will get readers excited, teach them something new or make them grateful they’re still in contact with the school?

Our editorial team goes round and round on what angle to take, the point of the story, the appropriate tone. Many of these stories require hours of research, interviews, reporting, editing and art direction.

And even after all that care and hard work, sometimes the story falls flat. No one reads it. Or they read it and think it’s a waste of time.

And then there are those “stories” that unfold like this:

1. An alumnus who graduated loooong ago writes you a letter and includes a printed photograph. The letter explains that the alumnus, now retired, finally achieved his dream of carving a model of a beloved university symbol, and he thought you’d like to see a photo of it.
2. You think it’s a sweet letter and photo, and your editorial pace has slowed down for the summer, so you decide to post it. (First of course you have to scan the photo.)
3. You quietly post it on a Friday and send one tweet about it.
4. It quickly becomes one of the most-read stories of the week and earns 4 comments.
5. The UT Facebook page posts the item and gets 260 Likes and 61 adoration-filled comments.

Sweet old man with school spirit: 1. Fancy story planning: 0.

Lesson learned? If you’re lucky enough to work for an organization that has millions of devoted followers, don’t forget to nurture that spirit and loyalty, even if it means you’re not doing a Big Important Story. And if you don’t have millions of devoted followers, what kinds of stories can you tell  to create some?

People need understanding and connection, not just information.
If all you’re doing is blasting your community with content, you–and your audience–are missing out. Both the Future of Context and How to Spark a Movement panels beautifully explained this point. Help someone truly undersand something, connect your community members with each other and unite people around a common mission. That’s when the magic starts to happen.

Think Visually
Three of the best sessions were about this. Dan Roam’s Why Words Won’t Work explained that we’re all visual thinkers, and pictures are key to solving problems. Interactive Infographics showed off how data can come to life if the visualization is done well. And they pointed out that infographics have gone mainsream: How I Met Your Mother uses them regularly (Marshall even needed a charts and graphs intervention because he was using them so frequently) and comedians like Demetri Martin use visualiztions in stand-up. In other words, infographics are cool.

And Visual Note-Taking 101 was the perfect primer and call to action for all of us budding artists.

Stories are powerful
Storytelling, experiences, journey, quest – whatever label you use, a narrative arc is going to resonate with people. A panel about enhancing the museum experience asked “What’s the epic win for your user?” In Narrating the Crowd, Dr. Sanjay Gupta and his brother showed off their project, The Kahani Movement, which is capturing the history of Indian-American immigrants by asking people to record their own family’s stories. “Ordinary people have extraordinary stories to share,” they said.

Stories help us remember information. In his Perfectly Irrational presentation, Stanford prof Dan Ariely explained how we are motivated by short-term rewards by telling the story of how he treated himself to a movie day every time he gave himself a painful injection he needed to treat his liver disease. That kept him on track and made sure he got his medicine. I”ll never forget that story, and as a result, that lesson will stay with me.

Open Up
NASA has embraced President Obama’s call to government agencies to become more transparent, and as a result this massive, aging organizations is connecting with new fans in a way that hasn’t been seen in a long time. All of their content is in the public domain, which means anyone can participate in space research and exploration.

Embrace Contradiction
You can be a cool science museum, an open bureaucracy, a warm-hearted business person, a funny girl, a designer who fights malnutrition. In fact those apparent contradictions are often where we find the most interesting people and projects.

Bonus – 5 Cool Web sites
Each of these was mentioned in a SXSW talk. Click and explore!

Apture.com – add contextual multimedia content to any site
www.Walking-papers.org - print maps, add notes and scan them back to share with others
www.Futureofcontext.com and www.explainthis.org -making online journalism more relevant
http://www.data.gov/ – more data than you could ever ask for

#futureofcontext

This was one of the most intriguing, thoughtful panels I’ve ever been to. NYU journalism prof Jay Rosen wrote about how they prepared for and ran the panel, and their work really paid off in a terrific presenatation:

Definition of Context: Something that precedes or comes right after what you’re talking about.

Thompson asked “How do we encounter news?”

Chances are that what you’re hearing about healthcare reform is episodic. It’s hard to keep track of. Constant, torrential.
We sell you quantity and newness of headlines – every time you go to NY Times home page, you expect to see new headlines that were updated just minutes ago.

We believe that over time, all these headlines will cohere into real knowledge. But evidence indicates this is actually debilitating. So we start gravitating to things we don’t really need an attention span for. So….

We need a larger framework and system to organize all these episodic bits. Create an intellectual framework and systemic information.

This is good for readers, but also for news producers. CONTEXT SELLS!! This American Life’s financial crisis reporting – “The Giant Pool of Money” has been enormously popular.

***

Rosen asked “What is the future of the timeless web?” Rosen: I’m a pragmatist. We advance when we have a really good problem.

“In order for news to be informative, people need to be informable,” Rosen said. We can’t receive updates to software that was never installed.

After listening to This American Life’s financial crisis series, Rosen “found myself following financial news with ease.”

***

Harris: Think about 2 ways of walking around a museum:
1. You wander around on your own, staring at art and reading a little card next to each piece that lists the artist’s name and the title of the work.
2. An art historian guides you through a tour of select pieces, explaining the historical significance, the painter’s state of mind at the time, his personal background, etc.

Trained musicians here more complex patterns in music than someone who doesn’t play an instrument.

Context and familiarity deepen our understanding.

Journalism is structured around an article. How valuable is that?

Harris founded http://www.apture.com/publishers/ – super cool platform/plug-in that brings rich video, reference articles, images, maps, etc. on to your site so readers can get more context without leaving.

***

Thompson: NPR creates topic pages, but he worries that their approach to context on the web too closely mirrors other formats. What’s the effect when we just sell context as more info?

Context should be the foundation. The episodic stuff should be the “More info…”

Context is not just a collection of links that looks like a fancy google search. Are we creating a topic ghetto?

Harris: Use past content you’ve already created to help provide context.

It’s writing something today that still has value in the future. It doesn’t go out of date.

Object-oriented storytelling. Engineers never do work they can’t use a second time. That helps scale context.

The movie “Food Inc” helps people understand the food industry. You put someone through that movie, they come out the other side as someone who now understands.

The web REWARDS context – google searches! Wikipedia pages are often the top search result.

Thompson quickly hacked together an WordPress site: http://www.themoneymeltdown.com/ to gather and archive quality stories about financial crisis. 50,000 people looked at it 75,000 times in 1 month.

It’s ok to pull together links, but you start to lose context when it’s just automated.

Rosen: Freedom of the Press includes the right to avoid and ignore the press! There are people who don’t want to be informed. But let’s start with what people do care about and expand from there.

Get people to do something: make things easier for the reader; Incorporate game mechanics (What if a news site was more like Super Mario Bros?)

Rosen: How are we doing at turning mystified users into people who understand something?

Think of journalism as a source of continuing education for readers.

Reorganize an article as a quest for clarity, not just reporting on something.

The panel created www.futureofcontext.org to continue the conversation.

Also check out http://explainthis.org/ – Started by Rosen. A demand-driven assignment desk where people can ask to have something explained and journalists can respond. Not much traffic yet.

And yet, as a communicator now working in higher education—at the very university I graduated from—I struggle to infuse the stories I write with the lighter side of life. I find it especially difficult working at a business school, where the culture is more buttoned-down. But the culture isn’t boring and stuffy either, so what’s the problem?

One very astute alumnus commented on our magazine reader survey that we are “too afraid of [our] readers.” BINGO! I’m afraid of having a sense of humor in our stories, because I don’t want to offend people or make the school look silly. I included a Dilbert cartoon in our Spring/Summer 2009 cover story, and part of me sort of expected to get hate mail for it.

I don’t think that fear should drive my writing, but it’s not altogether unwarranted. Watch 2 minutes of the fun, non-traditional, somewhat silly student-produced Yale admissions video below and then read some of the 148 comments people left on a New York Times article about the video (Yale disabled comments on the video on its YouTube page.)

“I actually felt myself getting dumber watching that”

“For heaven’s sake, it’s YALE, not Taco Bell. With their miniscule acceptance rate, it seems hardly necessary to stoop to this. This is appalling. Selling one of the premier universities with trite songs and salad bars. So much for the dignity of the institution.”

“Embarrasing. [sic]”

“Really, Yale? Are you seriously trying to appeal to the “High School Music” demographic?”

“I absolutely would never have set foot on the campus if I had ever seen this. It’s disgusting, and they should seriously consider whether they want to risk losing alumni contributions (such as mine) by leaving it up. It is in remarkably poor taste for an institution as selective as Yale to have such breathless rhapsodies, tongue-in-cheek, or no (and I dare say any irony is worn pretty thin by minute 15) marketed to the 90% of applicants who will receive the `thin envelope’ in April. It’s not really cute, funny or ironic if you don’t get in.”

Ouch! No wonder we’re afraid of showing a sense of humor in our communications.

The good news? A large number of the commenters seem to support the video and admire Yale’s attempt at humor and innovation. It’s also surpassed 250,000 YouTube views in less than 2 weeks, so it’s certainly getting attention.

I’m going to keep trying to find my funny bone in higher education storytelling, but I think I better build up my backbone too.