Author Archives: Kevin Moloney

About Kevin Moloney

Kevin Moloney is a professor of transmedia storytelling at Ball State University's Center for Emerging Media Design and Development. He holds a PhD from the University of Colorado's interdisciplinary ATLAS Institute. His photojournalism work has appeared in more than 960 New York Times stories as well as in most of the world's major publications. He taught photojournalism at the University of Colorado for 21 years.
November 6, 2012

Transmedia Journalism in 499 Words

By Kevin Moloney

Transmedia journalism is designing a project to unfold across multiple media in an expansive rather than repetitive way. In the movie and music industries much of a transmedia story may be told in a film or on an album. But a series of interconnected stories or pieces of context may be told through games, comics, novels, Web media, fan fiction and even amusement parks. Those other pieces expand rather than repeat the story.

A Story World

A transmedia project explores a space that contains multiple characters who can each tell multiple stories. It’s a space that you can draw a border around, like Batman’s Gotham City or that galaxy far far away. In journalism this could be a physical space like a neighborhood, a social space like a community, or an issue space like immigration or climate change. It could also be an ongoing beat topic, like state government.

Media Forms

The interconnected stories from that world take advantage of the different forms media can take. These include text, audio, video, game and interactive forms, graphic nonfiction, physical artifacts, lectures and many others. These ‘languages’ tell stories in unique ways. Stories from our world should use the media form that best fits the way an individual story in our world should be told. Nearly any media form can tell a good journalistic story if we use our usual forethought and ethical rigor.

Media Channels

Those forms can all be distributed in multiple ways. Text, for example, can be published by newspapers, magazines, the Web, or even sidewalk chalk and sky writing. These are media channels, or connection points with an audience. As we take advantage of the media forms above, we want to take advantage of the many ways we can reach varying audiences. For example, regular newspaper readers differ from gamers in where and how they can be found. Here we decide who it is important to reach, and place media to find those audiences. Journalism options include various print media, television, radio, museums, lectures, game consoles, public projections, billboards or any other means for the stories to be seen. Nearly any media channel could be used to tell a journalistic story. Websites and mobile apps are powerful channels as they can display many of the forms listed above. But they are each only single media channels with particular audiences. They alone don’t answer all our needs.

Partnerships

Few organizations exist that have the skills to produce many media forms and have access to many media channels. This requires teamwork between skilled producers of different media forms as well as cooperation between the owners of various media channels. Each partner would gain from the work or distribution of the others.

What it Creates

By telling interconnected stories we can embrace the nuance and complexity that exists in any story world. Through multiple forms we can engage the different parts of our story-loving brains. By distributing them across varying channels we can target the audiences that really matter.

13 Comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Transmedia in Journalism, Uncategorized, What is Transmedia Storytelling?

November 5, 2012

Transmedia Journalism as a Post-Digital Narrative

By Kevin Moloney

My new technical report, issued by the University of Colorado Boulder’s ATLAS Institute, is now available. The paper extensively discusses the differences between media form and media channel in building a transmedia journalism story world.

ATLAS TR 2012-11-02

Abstract

This paper examines the emergent entertainment and advertising technique of transmedia storytelling as a method for journalists to target their work to an increasingly dispersed public across an unlimited array of both digital and analog media. In doing so, I argue, journalists can better reach a relevant and decisive public with more engaging, complex and nuanced stories. I will examine the elements of transmedia storytelling, and discuss how different parts of its method have been used in two journalistic cases. I will conclude with a hypothetical example of how it might be used to fullest effect.

To obtain the full document, send an e-mail to vickie.stubbs@colorado.edu.

5 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | posted in Transmedia in Journalism, Transmedia Principles, Uncategorized, What is Transmedia Storytelling?

July 2, 2012

Down at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Information

By Kevin Moloney

© Kevin Moloney

As a photojournalist I once spent several off-and-on years documenting the rise of pentecostalism in Latin America. Lately that situation looks a lot like the state of journalism, its public and the arguments of some journalists about it.

© Kevin Moloney

Once the stronghold of the Roman Catholic Church, Latin America is turning Protestant. There people have been flocking for decades to upstart Protestant churches, particularly pentecostal ones. There are many and complicated reasons for this, but among them is that these little upstarts seem to directly address the needs of their communities. First they put churches in accessible locations like old movie theaters and storefronts in low-income neighborhoods. Then they provide daycare and job training to their congregations which are made up in significant numbers by single mothers. And by letting those congregations in on the service’s conversation they inspire a deep engagement with that community and its leaders. Services there are interactive and passionate by any observer’s measure.

© Kevin Moloney

By contrast, the old-line Catholic churches there tend to be centered around big, elaborate and baroque structures in the center of the cities where they are three bus transfers from the homes of the people they most hope to serve. On their altars are priests — mostly foreigners — who deliver pretty much the same information as the insurgent churches, but with a time-worn and emotionless demeanor. The pews are nearly empty and those sitting in them are mostly the elderly. Like many Catholic priests around the world, they remind the newcomers who show up on Christmas or Easter that they will go to hell if they don’t attend every Sunday.

Both kinds of church offer the same basic story, and both believe that this information is critical for the wellbeing of their congregations. It’s just the style of delivery that’s different, but the results have culture-changing impact on a continent where the Catholic tradition and local culture are deeply intertwined. “They are destroying Brazilian culture,” an anthropologist once told me. “You’re not supposed to samba if you’re a member of one of these churches.”

For journalists (like me) journalism is a religion too. Like other religions it has a long history, dogma, ritual, and a well-formed system of ethics that helps us structure what we say and how we act. We are passionate about what we do and the information we deliver, and we truly believe that it is something society needs to prevent it from going to hell. For us it is a vocation rather than a simple profession.

But as we too often rest on the value of our information alone, other media industries are breaking loose of their dogma and reinventing how they tell their stories. Hollywood, Madison Avenue and even Tin Pan Alley have thoroughly broadened their approach to storytelling in the entertainment and advertising industries. They, like those Latin pentecostal churches, are much more fleet of foot and open to what their publics are looking for in the 21st century than we in journalism might be.

© Kevin Moloney

If journalists are the clerics of their religion, then they are like the Catholic priests you find today standing at the altar of a 300-year-old Latin American cathedral, preaching to a congregation of five. And those five congregants are all old and will die sooner than later.

But in the suburb not far away is the Hollywood Megachurch which, despite its own problems, has figured out how to reach people in ways they can use: a more convenient location, effusive passion and direct dealing with the issues that concern the congregation. They embrace and perfect the use of new technologies with early-adopter fervor, and as a result their multiplex pews are full to bursting.

© Kevin Moloney

A few blocks away the Madison Avenue Evangelical Church has learned how to send out its evangelists and better grab the attention of potential converts. And they are reeling in the young and cynical with surprising and innovative new messages preached in surprising places.

And over on Tin Pan Alley the old-line pentecostal temple, after years of losing its congregation to free and easy online gospels, is figuring out how to compel people back with a more tailored, interesting and varietal outreach, and lower tithing.

Back downtown at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Information, our news priest is standing there wondering why nobody is paying attention anymore and telling anyone who walks in that they will go to hell if they don’t show up every Sunday.

All hope is not lost, however.

© Kevin Moloney

There is a real priest I photographed in São Paulo, Brazil, on that extended documentary a few years ago. Padre Marcelo Rossi is a former aerobics instructor turned Catholic priest who brought not only a youthful and effusive passion to his work, but he learned quickly — like his counterparts at the other churches — to use any medium available to spread his message, particularly ones that land straight in the path of his young target public.

© Kevin Moloney

From early in his career Padre Marcelo was doing radio shows and TV broadcasts, and releasing CDs and videos. He has acted in movies and his multiple Twitter feeds have more than 100,000 followers. At the time I covered him he attracted up to 10,000 people to weekday morning masses, many of whom were school kids who had cut class to go to church. His new sanctuary can hold 100,000.

That’s what we need in journalism. Like Padre Marcelo who changed nothing of the ritual, message or ethics of the Catholic religion but is drawing the crowd, we in journalism don’t need to sacrifice our standards at all. We simply need to stop waiting around the Cathedral for the congregation to show up on our bossy old terms and reach out to the public on its terms. We need to use the media people are paying attention to now and leave our message in the paths they already travel.

© Kevin Moloney

In an old religion like journalism, adaptation to different circumstances can be hard for true believers to take. But like the Catholics of Brazil, losing congregations to more fleet-footed houses of worship, we need to stop insisting on certain patterns of message delivery and look for ways to get our message out in more compelling ways.

There are certainly thinkers in journalism who are as creative as Padre Marcelo is in Brazil’s Catholic Church. They are hard at work like he is to reach out to people on terms that draw them to the story he feels is so important. But many of us journalists, true believers that we are, can’t fathom the massive change under our feet. All we seem to muster is an argument that our information is important to the functioning of the democracy, and you should read it like a good citizen and pay for your newspaper to fund it.

I, too, believe our information is critical and will save you from things like climate change hellfire and political damnation. But journalism suffers from what pressthinker Jay Rosen argues is a “wicked problem.” That means there is no one clear answer, and from the varying perspectives of all interested parties, the problem looks very different. Arguing for its value alone and waiting around for the public to come to us is about as valuable as the “come every Sunday or you’ll go to hell” argument offered from altars around the world on major holidays. However, very creative thinking and borrowing sensible ideas from the media industries across town is a start on shoring up the foundation of this grand old journalism cathedral.

“Priests aren’t showmen,” Archbishop Odilo Scherer of São Paulo once said in a clear reference to Padre Marcelo. “The Mass is not to be transformed into a show.”

Sound familiar?

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February 13, 2012

Within Limits and Free of Constraints

By Kevin Moloney

Paul F. Moloney photographs from the sidelines of a football game in 1957, for the Greeley Tribune. My father worked through the apex of one-to-many mass media in the U.S. (Photo by Bob Waters)

There are times when a constraint is fuel for the creative process. As a veteran photojournalist I know deeply how the need to tell an entire story within a small frame, by slicing a millisecond from the unstoppable flow of time can heighten my awareness, accelerate my storytelling skills and open the adrenalin valve. In journalism as a whole, constraints can lead to cleaner and more efficient stories.

But those constraints are largely a product of the mediascape of prior centuries. Classic journalism forms like the inverted pyramid structure, the ten-column-inch story or the 30-second broadcast news segment all came into being because space and time in legacy media was scarce and expensive. And those constraints have been in front of us for so long that they ceased to be just involuntary constraints and have become journalistic standards. Even as the cheap and plentiful Web has broken those restrictions, I have heard many veteran journalists argue that those classic forms are the only real journalism out there.

But what is journalism? I argue that it is simply telling a factual story reported by someone who was rigorous in his or her effort to eliminate assumptions and verify facts, and produced carefully for a concerned public. It isn’t defined by style, structure or medium. We now have virtually unlimited ways to tell a factual story and, in online media at least, an extremely low publishing cost. Stories that justify expansion are far less limited by the economics of the media.

The best journalism will always be efficient in its use of space and time. Daily coverage of boilerplate stories generally do not need expansive transmedia coverage to do their job well. They should stay concise and limited in the time they demand from the engaged public. But when major stories emerge that have complexity, nuance and deep connections to many other stories in our world, then transmedia storytelling is a valuable method.

Transmedia entertainment continues to grow. The transmedia-native SLiDE, an Australian Fox8 teen drama, unfolds on screen and expands through social media designed to give its teen fans a sense of ownership in the story. I was recently impressed by the transmedia worldbuilding efforts of the Ninjago toy series from Lego, in which a backstory of epic style was built for those funny little Lego characters. Academy-Award-nominated Chico & Rita has planted its story in front of new audiences through a comic and music. And dozens of documentary film projects in production declare themselves transmedia projects.

In journalism new tools continue to emerge. Deep Dive from the New York Times adds new degrees of drillablility to their massive archive, and the array of games published by the Times continues to grow. The explosive growth over the past few years of Tribune Media Group’s ChicagoNow and TribLocal confirm that the public is ready for a sense of ownership of their news as well as deeper engagement with it.

LUCEO Images' innovative Greater than the Sum exhibition

This is not simply a big-media game, however. I continue to watch with pride as my former students find new ways to bring their work to the public through both traditional media and its alternatives. They not only fuel their work but reach new audiences through crowd funding. They offer lectures on their stories, line gallery walls with their storytelling images and collect artifacts that connect to their stories. They reach out to the public by any logical means, and they do it alone or in small collectives.

Transmedia journalism does require more advance planning than other kinds of coverage. Decisions need to be made on questions like what the keystone medium will be, how will the story expand (not repeat) through other media, and what subset stories lend themselves to a particular medium. Our constraints of space and possibility are gone.

But what about limits? Fortunately for us we can call our limits self imposed. We can produce journalism within logical limits based only on the value of a story, the attention of our publics and the budget at hand. We can now work within limits even as we are free of old constraints.

The latest major piece of Contexts information is now up, and it looks at ways a transmedia journalism story can be told. Read on for more transmedia thinking. Drill deeper.

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November 23, 2011

Transmedia Journalism in Principle

By Kevin Moloney

A factual story can be told in more ways and more places than journalists usually consider. © Kevin Moloney, 2010

Here’s a miniature manifesto for transmedia journalism:

We journalists need to find the public across a very diverse mediascape rather than expecting them to come to us. The days of the captive journalism audience are over, and if we hope to serve our ideals of democracy, human rights, environment and positive social change, we need to find a broad public.

To make our stories salient we need to engage the public in ways that fit those particular media. We lose an opportunity to reach new publics and engage them in different ways when we simply repurpose the same exact story for different (multi) media. Why not use those varying media and their individual advantages to tell different parts of very complex stories? And why not design a story to spread across media as a single, cohesive effort?

To define our goals I’ll remix and repurpose Henry Jenkins’ principles of transmedia storytelling to fit the journalist’s cause. There’s nothing new to invent for them. Examples of all of these principles have already appeared in journalism, they just haven’t been sewn together in a predesigned and expansive story campaign. This is no more a “digital first” idea than it is an entity of ink-on-paper or Murrow-esque broadcast news. But it could embrace all three of those methods as well as games, virtual reality, museum installations or even paper airplanes. It also requires no change in the ethical ideals journalists value.

Transmedia journalism should be:

  • Spreadable: What makes a story infectious? How can we and do we inspire the public to share the stories we craft among their own networks, so they reach beyond our core public? Examples.
  • Drillable: How can we activate the public’s curiosity, enough to sleuth out more depth and detail on their own? If there is more to be found — either among our own extensions of the storyline or among the world’s social and data networks — the public’s engagement will be deeper. Examples.
  • Continuous and serial: As our stories expand across an array of media, how can they keep their continuity of shape, color and tone even as they leverage the strengths of each individual medium? By letting the story unfold across those media in series, would we keep public attention longer? Examples.
  • Diverse and personal in viewpoint: Can reporting from a variety of perspectives strengthen the telling of a complex story or engage new publics we might have otherwise missed? What can we gain from letting the public in on the process and result of journalistic work? Examples.
  • Immersive: We always want to draw our publics deeper into a story, to the point they forget they may be separate from it. How can we put alternative storytelling forms to work on a complex story, to better explain a system or help the public understand a story’s impact on its subjects? Examples.
  • Extractable: What can the public take away from our work and put to use in their everyday lives? The more our reporting enters their world, the more engaged the public will be. Examples.
  • Of real worlds: All our stories are the product of a real, complex and multifaceted world that is the envy of fiction writers. What can we do to embrace this complexity and nuance in journalism instead of always simplifying that world? Examples.
  • Inspiring to action: Most of us become journalists in hope of changing the world for the better. How can we inspire the public to put down our pages or step away from the screen and fix a problem or reward a success? Examples.

For a more detailed look at these qualities and how they have worked individually already continue on to the full Transmedia Journalism Principles page under Contexts at the top of the window, or linked at the top of the column on the right. If you just tuned in, find more context to these ideas in earlier posts on this blog and their related pages.

Coming next: Building it. It may not be as complicated as you think.

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November 4, 2011

Old Models in a New Mediascape

By Kevin Moloney

© Paul F. Moloney

Almost two decades into the Internet revolution few would dispute that the very nature of communication has changed. For centuries professional media of all sorts have relied on a one-way channel between themselves and their audiences. Entertainment, propaganda and information flowed from the top down — from one producer to many recipients who had few ways to talk back. But the appropriately named Web, when combined with powerful, cheap and ubiquitous production tools now in a pocket or purse, has changed communication from one-to-many to many-to-many. This change may be completely irrevocable — a genie out of a bottle.

Before the turn of the century the media all started working on solutions to hold onto their markets and their revenue streams in the face of this change. They’ve all at one time or another slammed the door with lawsuits or opened the store to encouraged sharing. Advertising has found success in the social nature of this new mediascape, and Hollywood has survived by raising the bar of production values ever higher and learning to tell stories across media in an expansive way. The music and journalism businesses are having a more difficult time of it.

Superficially it appears journalists either ignored the digital age or simply hoped it would go away as legacy news media have never seemed to find a solid foothold in the newer communication model. But, “the problem newspapers face isn’t that they didn’t see the internet coming,” writes New York University’s Clay Shirky in a blog post examining the troubles in the industry. “They not only saw it miles off, they figured out early on that they needed a plan to deal with it, and during the early 90s they came up with not just one plan but several.”

“Convergence” is the term applied to many of these plans, and that term often means different things to different media companies. The earliest idea involved spreading the content of one classic medium to another, such as running a newspaper’s content also on TV, radio and the Web the way the Tribune Company has. Another notion of convergence is the quickly fading “black box” idea where all content will converge onto a single device. And the last is an idea still popular in journalism schools. “Backpack journalists,” carrying still cameras, video and audio equipment and a laptop would produce their stories for multiple media formats from the start.

That last idea was illustrated by New York Times media correspondent and Twitter powerhouse David Carr in an October 2011 interview with Fresh Air host Terry Gross. “I look at my backpack that is sitting here, and it contains more journalistic firepower than the entire newsroom that I walked into 30 to 40 years ago,” he said, describing still and video cameras, audio recorders and computers and their constant connection the vast research repository of the Internet.

Despite this work to spread stories into other media, the story stays the same. Content is simply being repurposed for the new medium rather than being told in a way that uses the advantages of each medium, an idea from which Hollywood and Madison Avenue are moving away in favor of a transmedia approach.

But what’s the point in finding a new place and method for legacy news media in a many-to-many, media-glutted environment? Carr noted in the same interview that although we all have access now to an endless news feed through the Web, social networking and other sources, legacy media could take up the role of looking back to point out what, among that “huge fire hose of data that’s washing over us all,” was important:

All this stuff has gone whizzing past me, and I seem to know a lot, but I don’t really know which part of it is important … I’d go to our page-one meeting and they would be organizing this hierarchy of the six or seven most important stories in Western civilization. Meanwhile the Web is above them pivoting and alighting on all these stories are morphing and changing and I thought, ‘how silly is this?’ But you know what? I came to want that resting place where someone yelled stop and decided, look, this is the stuff you need to know about going forward. There’s both real-time news, and then newspapers have become kind of a magazine experience for me where it’s a way to look back at what has happened.

For a more detailed look into these changes, go to the Where Journalism has Gone Before page linked near the top of the right column or under Contexts at the very top of the page. Read on. Drill deeper.

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September 14, 2011

Agency, Game and Transmedia Story

By Kevin Moloney

© Kevin Moloney

“Story” has been with us for as long as we have been communicating. We tell stories to better understand how we can or should move through life. Existentialists such as Paul Ricour and Peter Brooks argue that an act of narration allows us to deal with time, destiny and mortality, and to create identities.  Narrative allows us to situate ourselves in the world.

But as narratives are a metaphor for our own lives, games are practice for it. “Games traditionally offer safe practice in areas that do have practical value,” notes cyberdrama theorist Janet Murray in Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. “Lion cubs roughhouse with one another in order to grow to be predators. Small children play hide and seek, a good way of training hunters, and ring-around-a-rosy, a good way of practicing cooperation and coordinated behaviors. Older children in our society are understandably drawn to pitting themselves against machines.” And contest stories are as old as Odysseus. Murray places the contest as “one of the most pervasive organizing principles of human intelligence.” These dramas compel us through stories from MacBeth to Mortal Kombat. If the former is the drama told, the latter is the drama happening.

In a game the drama happens to us through “agency,” the pleasurable aspect of play in which the players actions have meaningful consequences in the game. We act, the game responds, the story changes. A novel asks us to set aside our agency, our right to make choices argues Ken Perlin. Instead the agency of the protagonist takes over and we are swept up in his or her struggles. We cannot interfere as we hitch ourselves to them for a ride. “By way of contrast, look at games,” he notes. “A game does not force us to relinquish our agency. In fact, the game depends on it. When you play Tomb Raider you don’t actually think of Lara Croft as a person the same way, say, you think of Harry Potter as a person… While you’re actually playing the game, the very effectiveness of the experience depends on you becoming Lara Croft… Every choice she makes, whether to shoot, to leap, to run, to change weapons, is your choice.”

Game play can also deepen immersion. Murray pointed to the early text-based Zork computer game to demonstrate the difference your presence in the story makes. In the game you enter a dungeon through a trapdoor. It is slammed behind you, and, She says, “The moment is startling and immediate, like firing a prop gun on the stage of a theater. You are not just reading about an event that occurred in the past; the event is happening now, and unlike the action on the stage of a theater, it is happening to you.”

In an effective transmedia franchise the keystone element may be a narrative story told through film or in a novel, in which a fully drawn character acts without our influence. But games offer an important expansion of the world in which that story unfolds. Through a game we can step into that world and exercise our agency to create our own side story or experience the actions of the hero first hand. We can feel the tension as we approach the Death Star’s exhaust port and the elation of a good shot that wins the battle.

The role games play in a transmedia story is examined more on the Lure of Games and Power of Networks page linked here, under Contexts at the top of the site, or near the top of the right sidebar. Stay tuned for posts on how games can work in a transmedia journalism story.

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August 29, 2011

Lost in a Matrix of Avatars: Principles of Transmedia

By Kevin Moloney

In late 2009, media scholar, transmedia describer and master builder of lists Henry Jenkins outlined his “Seven Principles of Transmedia Storytelling.” The pair of blog posts went a long way to shape the entertainment industry’s understanding of what transmedia storytelling does out there, once it is let loose. Their title, “Revenge of the Origami Unicorn,” refers to a clue to deeper stories that makes a brief appearance in Blade Runner, and is an invitation for the viewer’s imagination or sleuthing instincts to launch.

You may be awaiting that origami yourself, hoping soon the unicorn drops and leads to what transmedia journalism will be. I promise that is up soon, in pages rich with examples. But first I want to set the stage for some principles of transmedia journalism by looking at Jenkins’ principles in entertainment. These will hopefully be an invitation to imagine transmedia journalism on your own. They are:

  • Spreadability — Stories are compelling enough to be spread through fan interaction. What stories do you want to share?
  • Drillability — Stories inspire deeper investigation, engaging the fans to explore the story’s context, and solve intricacies or mysteries. Keep the gaps of The Matrix or the layers of Lost in mind with this one.
  • Continuity — Here multiple stories exist within the same defined world, and maintain coherence and plausibility. Think of how tightly the many stories of the Star Wars galaxy fit together.
  • Multiplicity — Though continuity is highly prized, a multiplicity of story possibilities may make a tale more fun or a richer experience for fans. Look at how the 2009 reimagining of the very continuous Star Trek story upended the characters’ lives, or drill around for alternate tellings of familiar tales, like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies or Spider-Man India.
  • Immersion — A good tale, a good character or a rich story world pulls us in and lets us forget ourselves and feel present at the scene. When was the last time you forgot you were in a theater or paging through a novel? Did the impressive 3-D of Avatar pull you into the silver screen?
  • Extractability — What can a fan take away from the story and bring into their own life? From Captain Kirk lunch boxes to the action figures of Star Wars and even the theme parks of modern entertainment franchises, more and more things and places that contribute to the grand story are available to us.
  • Worldbuilding — Each story in a transmedia franchise contributes to the complexities of the world in which they take place. Remember how C.S. Lewis built Narnia in the imaginations of readers?
  • Seriality — Serial stories are not new. From Dickens’s serialized novels to Harry Potter, the unfolding of a tale has held onto us like a Dallas cliffhanger. A serial keeps us in a story world longer.
  • Subjectivity — No, this isn’t that thing we work to avoid in journalism. Here Jenkins means a transmedia story embraces the varying points of view of multiple characters. Ever read Bram Stoker’s Dracula? The whole frightening novel is constructed from personal and subjective letters, allowing us to see the same story through multiple eyes.
  • Performance — A transmedia story may inspire a fan to act. What stories inspired us to play when we were young (or when we’re old and nobody is looking)? A good story — a really good one — can grab us so thoroughly that we want to act it out ourselves or write a new installment of the tale. As geeky as that sounds, it is a real mark of deep engagement.

These principles are fleshed out in greater detail and with many examples on the Transmedia Principles page linked near the top of the right column or under Contexts at the very top of the page. Read on. Drill deeper.

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August 15, 2011

World Building

By Kevin Moloney

© Kevin Moloney

In his book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, media studies scholar Henry Jenkins identified the core idea of transmedia storytelling: “More and more, storytelling has become the art of world building, as artists create compelling environments that cannot be fully explored or exhausted within a single work or even a single medium.” An experienced screenwriter told him:

When I first started, you would pitch a story because without a good story, you really didn’t have a film. Later, once sequels started to take off, you pitched a character because a good character could support multiple stories. And now, you pitch a world because a world can support multiple characters and multiple stories across multiple media.

But what could world building have do with journalism? It’s easy to imagine a Hollywood screenwriter creating an entire fictional world (or galaxy). But in journalism we refudiate invented things. The beauty of journalism, however, is that we don’t need to create stories, characters or worlds. The real world is our transmedia world and it is already filled with cultures, characters and stories to be written and produced, connected to each other and delivered through multiple media channels.

© Kevin Moloney

Transmedia storytelling in entertainment, though years old, is still new enough that definitions are troublesome. Academics examine past works to distill principles and definitions, and practitioners define it more in terms of what they would like it to do and where they think it ought to go. In the past year some debates erupted over how the technique should be defined.

I am going to stick largely to the definitions made by Henry Jenkins, who popularized the term and continues to describe it at length. In answer to the debates, Jenkins recently posted some further reflections on transmedia storytelling on his blog. These reflections not only examine the terms of the debate, but help to put further flesh on the idea. It’s a valuable read.

Today I’ve added a new context page “What is Transmedia Storytelling,” where you can find a more detailed and example-filled look into where transmedia comes from and what social and economic changes have fueled it. Find it linked here, at the top of the blog and on the right column of the page. Watch for much more there in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, here’s a nicely done little “Transmedia 101” video by One 3 Productions:

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July 30, 2011

Welcome

By Kevin Moloney

Social Media. © Kevin Moloney

If you are here, reading this, you know that journalism is having some trouble. Not only is the economic model that used to pay for it sinking fast, but journalists are having a harder time reaching the public with their work in a very diverse and dispersed mediascape. This blog and my ongoing research is mostly about the latter problem, though all of journalism’s woes are inextricably linked. Rather than waiting for the public to come to us for the news, we need to send our work down every conceivable avenue to find the public — new publics too — and win their engagement and loyalty. We need to improve the way we tell stories.

That is where the title of this blog comes in. “Transmedia” is one of the top buzzwords of the past two years in the entertainment and advertising industries. It is proving to be extremely effective in reaching and engaging the public in those two realms, and there is much about it that we can put to use in telling the informative and factual stories journalists want to tell. Hollywood and Madison Avenue are using transmedia techniques to win more fans and engage them more deeply. That’s something we should want too.

Transmedia storytelling is not just convergence or multimedia by a new name. It’s also not an entity solely of the digital age. The Web is an excellent tool for much of it, but a transmedia story doesn’t unfold there or in any other single medium alone. It can, however, use any aspect of any media from the cave painting to the latest killer app.

Transmedia storytelling and the transmedia journalism I propose tells stories across an array of media — analog, digital and even brick-and-mortar — in an expansive rather than repetitive way. That would mean telling a complex story not only across the usual print, Web and broadcast media, but possibly through books, games, immersive experiences, graphic nonfiction (comics), gallery walls, museum installations, public lectures, public interaction and authorship, or any other medium appropriate to the story. It also means not simply re-editing a story for repetition among those media.

In entertainment it looks (briefly) like this:

Star Wars did it largely by accident. Starting with one film in 1977, the story proved so compelling and engaging that it exploded across the mediascape from films to comics, books, games, toys, fan fiction and video, and any other medium you can think of. Inspired by this, creators of The Matrix franchise in the late 90s designed a similar experience from the start, planning how their story would unfold not only on the screen, but continue through all those other media and more. Since the Matrix tale began more than a decade ago, other entertainment franchises, like the hugely successful Lost TV series, have successfully used transmedia storytelling design to rivet fans and put them to work finding, sharing and shaping stories.

As this blog unfurls I will describe what transmedia storytelling is, where it comes from and how we can use it within the goals and ethics of journalism. It will come in both appetizer- and entree-sized chunks, but if you’re a big eater you can download the full academic paper. You’ll also see links under The Big Idea at right to all the pieces of important context and background on transmedia storytelling and transmedia journalism as they are published. Subscribe to the feed or the related tweets to know when there’s something new here.

This blog will also be a hub for my ongoing research on the subject, and a place to air my and your related discoveries about it. Post links to interesting examples of transmedia stories from any industry, and send observations and suggestions my way. I’d love to hear them.

This post is the barest scratch of the surface of what will come here. Look ahead for deeper explanations of what transmedia storytelling looks like in the entertainment media — with many linked examples — places where journalism has gone before, and what transmedia journalism might look like — also with many linked examples. To start a deeper exploration go to the Contexts page, linked here, at top and at right.

The journalism profession is not short on experimentation with new ideas, new technologies and new storytelling methods. But they seem more like attempts to keep the publics they used to have than to find and engage new ones. I believe by adopting the techniques of transmedia storytelling, we can reach out to new readers, viewers, listeners and interactors in the media spaces where they already are, and engage them more deeply in complex real-world stories. It could certainly be easier than reviving our old model of expecting them to come to us.

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