"It's time to get back to the business of storytelling"

Håvard Ferstad

It's easy to tell that Nick Bilton has worked within a traditional media company - the New York Times - for a while. His message to media executives is clear: Stop fighting your employees, stop fighting your readers. Get back to the business of storytelling.

What constitutes a media company today? The boundaries between newspapers, radio and tv companies, and other broadcasters are getting blurred. They all offer a combination of text, images and video, and most of it it is available in digital formats. As Bilton puts it: "The only thing that separates them as different types of experiences is a memory of what they were in the past."

The boundaries between newspapers, radio and tv companies, and other broadcasters are getting blurred. They all offer a combination of text, images and video, and most of it it is available in digital formats

We are told that news have become a commodity, due to the reduced cost of distribution and the extended reach the web is enabling. This is a view which is challenged by Michael Schrage at MIT’s Media Lab. He maintains that if your product has become a commodity, you're not being innovative enough: "You become a commodity when you are no longer creative enough to make your offers more appealing."

Stop fighting your readers, stop fighting your employees

Bilton has the following message to the managers who ignore the silent masses within their media companies:

"It’s not enough to sit idly by, ignoring and quieting the employee inside your company who doesn’t buy CDs anymore, or canceled her cable television, or started playing video games instead of reading a book, or stopped buying the print edition of the newspaper. These people are trying to tell you about the future and how it works. It’s up to you to listen."

Consumers aren't buying CDs anymore. Why? They don't want the entire album if there's only one song which is important to them. Digital distribution of music gives the consumer a choice to buy only one track, and downloading is almost instant. This applies to newspapers as well. There is no denying that it is important to bring important issues to the attention of the reader, whether s/he wants it or not. But a lot of content is totally uninteresting. Try selling newspapers to a 20-year old by telling him about the great two-page spread of obituaries and pictures of newborn babies.

Rather than trying to explore new forms of storytelling, media companies focus on traffic and page views.

Community - a missed opportunity

New communities are constantly created on the web. In the same way the printing press created communities of readers - some of which later became nations - the internet is changing the concepts of trust and boundaries of space and time. The newspaper was once the source which ensured that I, as a member of the society, didn't miss anything important within the imagined community I perceived myself as a member of. Twitter is the modern equivalent which helps me stay connected with the communities I feel part of. The only difference being that today most people have a range of interests and connections, and feel that they belong to several imaginary communities.

A newspaper is no longer the one-size-fits-all gateway for such a community.

Get back to the business of storytelling

Bilton suggests that readers are searching for new forms of storytelling, but news organisations don't offer them yet. The truth is that newspapers are not selling content -- individual texts and photos. They're selling an experience. Experience is attention.

The way forward is to try and enrich the experience; to use the medium to create new ways of telling stories. If media companies are measuring the quality of their product quantitatively by saying "let's make one video a day", then they are far from enriching the experience.

Bilton maintains that we're all telling stories; whether it's a 140 character tweet, a press release, a book or a blog post.

Rather than trying to explore new forms of storytelling, media companies focus on traffic and page views. Bilton suggests four new, important commodities as alternatives to the established world view: Length, aggregation, immediacy and niche.

Bilton maintains that we're all telling stories; whether it's a 140 character tweet, a press release, a book or a blog post.

The real challenge for the future of news is: Get back to the business of storytelling.