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Presentation at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford on June 17th, 2013 by the journalist fellow Saila Kiuttu

This is Jill Abramson, the Executive Editor of The New York Times. She is probably the most powerful editor in the world.

She thinks that the future of digital storytelling will look like the New York Times’ feature project Snow Fall – The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek. This compelling story about an avalanche has received a lot of positive attention after it was published in the end of 2012. It also received a Pulitzer Prize.

This is how it looks like. It is a text-based narrative with multimedia (videos, audio, images, slideshows, animations and graphics) integrated into the text right where they belong.

The video is exactly where it belongs in the story.

Multimedia elements can be opened in full screen and they all add dimension, either facts of feeeling to the story.

Here is an example of a slide show. It presents the lives of the characters before the avalanche. It is also integrated to the text.

Interactive graphics evolve alongside the text, at the same speed than the reader scrolls down the page.

Animations show how an avalanche is created. You can either play it like a video or watch in pictures.

This animation takes the reader to the place of action.

You know how Americans are eager to make verbs from nouns? They have started to use snowfall as a verb in The New York Times’ newsroom. Can we snowfall this story? Meaning in Jill Abramson’s words ”to tell a story with fantastic graphics and video and every kind of multimedia”.

But is Abramson right? Is this the future of digital storytelling?

In my research I looked for an answer to the question what storytelling on tablets should look like and I reached a similar kind of conclusion: Snow Fall is a good example of digital storytelling. However it is not designed purely for tablets so it doesn’t use all the technical dimensions of a tablet.

In my paper I established what are the key characteristics of a tablet-specific application. I found eight characteristics Snow Fall fullfils all of these four.

These are the next four characteristics. With making fingers happy I mean using the touch element: People want to play with the touch screen (wipe, scroll, tap). You must offer them the opportunity to explore with fingers.

Snow Fall is simple and clear how to use. It only lacks a bit in aesthetics. It is almost dull in looks without any visible reason. And it doesn’t really make fingers happy (because it was not designed only for tablets).

For example Wired Magazine, which according to my research is also a very good example of a well-done tablet application, is clearly better in taking fingers into account (and applying design aesthetics). In this screen capture: by tapping the number in the graphic the information box changes.

Touching different decades brings more specific information and the arrows take you to the next page.

These characteristics typically remain unchanged from article to article or publication to publication, so they don’t require everyday altering work.

But the real challenge lies within these characteristics. For these one-time developing or coding is not sufficient. They require everyday work, which requires money, time and new, tech savvy staff.

But I think that to compete with other content providers and googles and yahoos the media industry will need to step up.

Otherwise… Others will do it anyways. Here is an example of Guardian Australia’s new application, Firestorm, that follows Snow Fall’s example in the way it has been produced. But in many ways it has been developed to look and feel even better. Design aesthetics is better and it is nicer for the fingers.

These kind of evolutionary versions of the model piece of digital storytelling already exist. Based on my research the future will owned by the ones that take into consideration the tablet-specific characteristics.

My research paper “INTEGRATE MULTIMEDIA, MAKE FINGERS HAPPY – JOURNALISTIC STORYTELLING ON TABLETS” is to be published soon on the Reuters Institute’s webpages.https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk