Benjamin Blank: Why are we talking about storytelling at CES? If you look at the connection between storytelling and technology, they're very closely linked, right? From the printing press, obviously, to radio, the silver screen TV, and the Internet. There's been a lot of time to develop all the content for each of those platforms in that it's taken a number of years to refine, if not decades. With the explosion of technology and digital, our storytelling has really expanded exponentially. The platforms that we're on, the way that we tell stories, the audiences we tell stories to, and so as we look at the future and at this explosion of technology, we need to consider how we tell stories. Storytelling is actually the fuel of a lot of these. And Frankly, most technology, but especially communication technology, if it doesn't actually fuel storytelling, and a storytelling doesn't actually fuel that platform, it doesn't exist. So storytelling is instrumental in terms of the success of platforms.
Benjamin Blank: So storytelling, it's overused in many ways. Everybody in our industry says it, and I just like to kind of go down the line. And what is storytelling to you? And we'll start with you, Ryan. What does that mean?
Ryan Ford: Yeah, I think to me, storytelling is just about extracting the authentic truth out of a situation or out of a specific person. That's what storytelling is. And I think the levels of how you rate storytelling is understanding how good you were at extracting that truth. Right. And I think that truth is very specific to that individual or to that situation. However, the better you are at storytelling, you can extract that truth so that everyone can see themselves in that person or in that situation. It's about truth, and it's about really being authentic to that truth.
Janet Balis: I guess I see things reasonably simply, which is it's a way to communicate. It should compel a human to feel something and make a human connection, and ultimately, it should compel a human to do something. And I think that's in its simplest form, what storytelling is.
Evan Shapiro: I think that storytelling is meant in its sheer art to be a reflection of society and a culture that it's being born into. And that storytellers or creators, their responsibilities, hold a mirror up to society in some form or fashion and ask the culture to look at itself, to look inward, to look outward. And so I see it as almost creating a mirror for the people who read, watch, hear the story itself.
Benjamin Blank:All of us have been doing a version of storytelling for a while. When you started your career, things looked a little bit different than they do today. So can you just speak to that a little bit? And why don't we start with you, Evan, in terms of how things change and how has that changed your thinking?
Evan Shapiro: And to me, the ability to start a story in one media and then move it to others. I mean, we've been doing that forever. Books turn into movies, movies turn into musicals, musicals turn back into movies. “Matilda”. But the idea that there is this kind of lifecycle of a story and that gaming can now be annex tension of that, short form on social can be a form of that, audio can be a form of that. So, to me, the technology we've added to storytelling, I don't think it's necessarily changed the nature of telling stories itself. Meaning, like, there's a beginning, character still matters, plot still matters.
Benjamin Blank:You talk about adaptation a little bit, which is interesting in that a book to film or TV is a process we all understand when you're talking about content and the idea of multiple platforms and taking something from one platform to another. Can we talk a little bit about adaptation and the idea of maybe some of your learnings in terms of adapting one piece of content that's created?
I know that at the beginning of kind of the digital experiment and revolution, there was this belief that, oh, yeah, it's just put what's on TV and just put that on this platform, and it'll work amazingly well. And there's a truth to every platform. There's something that it does, it's why it exists. It differentiates itself from the platforms before it. So there are rules and there's a language that is spoken on that plat form.
Ryan, do you want to talk a little bit about kind of and I think it's still in relation to kind of learnings the beginning of your career and where it's evolved. But what are your thoughts on that?
Ryan Ford: Well, I started off as a journalist, as a hip hop journalist that wrote for something storied that we call “magazines”. Right. We don't know what those are?
Ryan Ford: “Magazine.” “Magazine.” (Don't you) Remember print?
ライアン・フォード:「雑誌」「ざっし」(ゆっくりと) 印刷したやつ、覚えてる?
【訳者補足】
近年、アメリカでは、続々と紙の雑誌(2022年のニュースで、Eating Well、Entertainment Weekly、Health、Instyle、Parents、People en Españolが、それ以前にも有名雑誌、例えば O magazine, Field & Stream, Outdoor Life, Popular Science, Shape, Air & Space Smithsonian, and ARTnewsも)が廃刊し、オンライン版のみになるなどデジタル化されており、ライアンさんはそんな状況を揶揄してボケてみたところ、まわりのみんなも凄腕クリエイターですから、そのボケに乗ってみた…という展開です。
Ryan Ford: They used to be sold on newsstands.
ライアン・フォード:それら(雑誌)はかつてニューススタンドで売られていました。
” I worked for The Source magazine. ”
(ソース・マガジンで働いてました)
と言いたいだけなのに、クリエイターが集まっているので
ボケやジョークが絶えません
Others: On Paper?
その他みんな:紙なの?
Ryan Ford: I worked for... Paper. Made of paper. Made of trees.
Ryan Ford: I worked for The Source magazine. Right? So I was a hip hop journalist, and I thought it was my duty as a journalist, as a trained journalist, I went to school for journalism to tell the story as unbiased as I could, right. And give people that didn't have the opportunity to be in the room with Puff Daddy or Snoop Dogg or somebody the idea of what it was like. I also felt a responsibility to tell the stories of the communities that they came from in a way that was provided the right respect and had the right value for that. Right. And I was good at it. Right. I was good at taking this scenario and translating it into words and then putting it on trees and putting it on newsstands and then people would read it.
But then came social media, then came GoPros, then came iPhones and all these other things. And you don't need someone to translate that story in real time, oftentimes, especially with celebrities and rappers especially, they're telling their own stories on social media, to your point, on different social media in different ways. Right. and I don't look at it so much as adaption. I like that. But I look at it as optimization. There's an opportunity here to tell a story differently on Instagram Live than you would on a podcast, than you would on a scripted TV show. Right.
So I think that the best stories now are the stories that live, like you said, everywhere, right. A bit asymmetrical at times you could tap into it at this point, and that point, even though it happened later in the timeline, is going to refer you back to this point. Right. And that is really how we're judging stories now. Right? There's a good book, of course, there's a good magazine article, right, but how does that come alive and how do people talk about it? Right? They might not be adding to the story, but so much of the user generated content, the comments are adding to the experience of what that story is.
Benjamin Blank:I think we're also seeing in some ways, the context of a platform can all of a sudden fast forward through the story, right? So a tweet in some ways, there's already the context for what's being talked about and so then you're actually able to be a part of the story in some ways. And there's already a context when we talk about social and storytelling within social, you're either starting the context or you're actually adding to it as an audience member in some ways.
Janet, what have your experience has been in terms of what have you learned since the beginning of storytelling and where you are now?
Janet Balis: Well, I, too, started in print, so I started time Inc. In magazines. And for me, that adaptation, there's so many different things that it makes me think about. First and foremost, timing for me was about quality, it's about editorial integrity. And I think that gives you that simple notion that in order for content to connect with humans, it has to have quality, it has to make that human connection. And I think that that's a simple truth that carries forward.
But if I think about at one point I was at Martha Stewart and we were translating magazines and we were actually doing the very first issue for the iPad. And there's a big difference between the bespoke imagery that you would see in a Martha Stewart magazine of a P&E on a still page and how you could bring that to life when you could touch the iPad and that P&E could animate and actually open. And the photography that you could use of all the different moments of that flower going through every one of those moments, and suddenly that actually blossoms in front of you. That's a whole different form of storytelling. And so being able to realize that it wasn't simply about paging through the magazine on an iPad, that's a new dimension.
And when I think about when I was at the Huffington Post, there it was, that intersection again, we had lots of journalists coming over from the New York Times or Vanity Fair, again, print as their heritage, quality editorial as their heritage. But there they were really engaging with that ”notion of content and conversation”, how to create velocity around a story and really create that dialogue.
I think one of the biggest things, though, that really strikes me is that while the palette has changed and there are these very important distinctions about the creative dimensions you can bring forward in each of the platforms, the way we discover content has changed because I think at the beginning of my career, it was much more top down. I mean, there were a few media entities that basically programmed and we kind of all watched the same things from a few different programmers and we aggregated around the same property, generally speaking. And so content had to be compelling, but it was kind of programmed to us.
Right now there's a lot more discovery, I think, of the mid and the long tail of content because of first search than social now,much more dramatic algorithms that let us scroll through things that seem to know what's inside of our brains and our subconscious. I think that's the biggest thing that's really changed in terms of storytelling and what we get to see.
私がHuffington Postにいたときのことを考えると、あの(歴史ある新聞や雑誌が縮小、廃刊し、業界関係者が集まる新しいメディアとしての)交差点にも、New York TimesやVanity Fairから移ってきた(職人的な、昔気質の)多くのジャーナリストがいました。しかし、彼らは「コンテンツと会話という概念」に深く関わり、いかにしてストーリーの周りに速度を作り出し、対話を作り出せるかを考えていました。