Rob: I've got to say a couple of things. I started
OpEdnews as a blog, and its evolved into a very powerful complex content
management system that I basically designed with a programmer and the help of
the whole team of editors and a bottom up approach from the readers and
contributors to this site. And of course, the 60,000 registered members on the
site now. And one of the things that always been a question is, "What do you
headline? What do you put at the top?" And so what we've done is we've had
different ways of letting people look at it. So, we have one view where I do it
and some of the other editors make decisions about what to headline. But
another way to look at it is people can just go buy what is the most viewed
stuff and there's a whole page that let's people see what other people are
seeing, so they can look at it based on what's the most popular. Or they can
look at it based on ratings of different aspects of the writing or which ones
have the most comments, where the most discussion is taking place, and that way
we give the opportunity for people to look at a curated version by people, but
we also give them the opportunity--we certainly do this by ourselves--New York
Times has the favorites as well--But we let people look at it based on crowd
sourcing, how the crowd decided what was most interesting or most important and
I think--
Peggy: I think you're onto something
really important. And it's like that story about the guy looking for his keys
and he's looking under the light, because it's easy to see there.
Rob: Right.
Peggy: When perhaps the stories are most
important are somewhere out in the dark, but they're a little harder to get to.
So, asking the public through crowd sourcing kinds of approaches is I think is
part of the answer, and curation and so I think multi-threaded approaches,
which is what I hear you're doing, is where the answers rest on that kind of
question.
Rob: The other thing I have to tell you, is about nine
years ago or more, I got interested in what I saw as an emergence of a "Science
of Story." Robert McKee was doing workshops on story structure and I found a
lot of other people who were writing about it. The screen writing and novelist
world, were having all these books coming out describing different approaches
like, The Heroes Journey, from Joseph Campbell. It was adapted by
Chris Vogler who wrote The Writer's
Journey and *(inaudible) 105:48 were
adapted by James Bonnet, and then there were a whole collection of these things
happening, so I took a look and I started looking at story as a business, and I
literally went and did research on how much was the annual spending for
different aspects of story: the book business, the TV business, the movie
business, the game business, marketing, psychotherapy, politics, religion. They
all use story and what concluded was, after energy and transportation story is
the biggest business in the world.
Peggy: That's fascinating. That's
fascinating. I want to add another element, if I may real quick, / about story.
Rob: / Sure.
Peggy: And it has to do with this notion
of a Possibility Orientation. When journalism, and journalism is notorious for
this, takes us into who to blame, and what's bad, and why things are broken and
all of that, and what they leave behind is a sense of despair, victimhood, no
hope, etc., and I'm beginning to see a shift. And and asking myself in terms of
our next step with Journalism That Matters, "How do we raise into consciousness
of not just journalists--but we are all storytellers--this notion of telling
stories that bring a lens of possibility? And I don't mean shy away from
difficult stuff, by any stretch of the
imagination. But how do we tell the story in a way that takes us into the heart
of what's broken or not working, in a way that asks those questions of "What's
a possibility given what's taking place?" Because when we do that, it
activates, it inspires, it engages, and it supports us in taking charge of our
world. I personally think that journalism is a form of activists [activism],
which is like anathema to say to mainstream journalists where this ethic, this
silly ethic of objectivity, which actually had its roots in being objective
about looking at many sources to come to your conclusions. Now, it was never,
ever supposed to be about "a" verses "b," which is what it's been reduced to.
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