Digital media has radically transformed the field of journalism. Breaking news often comes in the form of a Tweet, and stories unfold with the momentum of real-time, crowd-sourced input that can lend as much dramatic tension to the tradeoffs between speed and validity as the substance of the story itself.
Inevitably, our means of storytelling will continue to evolve along with our technologies. At the 2014 ASPEN IDEAS FESTIVAL, we connected with Quartz Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief Kevin Delaney to share some insights into the shifting dynamics at the confluence of storytelling, marketing, and digital media.
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The rise of digital media has contributed to a flood of content and information. How do you filter the content you consume?
Kevin Delaney: I’m an editor, so my job is partly to filter the information coming in. So I follow a lot of people on TweetDeck, and what I find is that events that are important, or conversations or links that are important, tend to repeat in my feed.
So, if I missed them the first time, I can usually dive in later. That’s one thing.
I actually still use RSS feeds. I use Digg’s RSS reader and have a bunch of sources that I follow. My filtering methods are very union‑era, manual, and based on colleagues, because we’re all in this enterprise. We’re all — the other journalists and I — constantly sharing links over instant messaging.
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Since we’re at an ideas festival — where do you find your best ideas?
Kevin Delaney: I think Twitter is a really interesting source of ideas. You could wake up in the morning and just read Twitter for a while, and be pretty informed about what’s going on in the world.
What’s interesting about Twitter is that you have a combination of news and things that are interesting that could just be ideas that are fair game, for instance. That’s probably the most important specific tool that I use.
I’m pretty agnostic as to the source of the idea or news. I wouldn’t discriminate against a source.
Obviously, I’d evaluate whether it seems legitimate and whether it’s a publication or an individual who has a track record for accuracy, but I don’t really go to a single source. It’s the feed that serves as a source of ideas.
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Storytelling is an integral component for the spread of ideas. How does the power of storytelling manifest in your work?
Kevin Delaney: I think storytelling is still really powerful, but it is taking different forms. I think it’s a good development, but the 800‑word, mediocre attempt to tell a story with a gratuitous anecdotal lead is not successful in social media, and as a result the readership is not particularly dynamic for that.
“the 800‑word, mediocre attempt to tell a story with a gratuitous anecdotal lead is not successful in social media”
I think storytelling that’s really successful is longer‑form storytelling where there’s a great narrative and good reporting. That stuff is really successful.
We just had a piece that’s close to 8,000 words that I just found out is included in “The Best Business Writing of 2014” ebook that’s coming out. That’s a story.
It’s Steve LeVine‘s piece, “The Mysterious Story of the Battery Startup That Promised GM A 200-mile Electric Car” about Envia Systems, a battery technology start‑up that was the great hope for American battery technology, but fell apart.
On the shorter end, people tend to want stuff that’s more focused and can be really creative and have a really good angle, but it’s not mean or lean. So, storytelling is really important.
“Finding something that’s interesting is the chief value that people look for in social media”
Finding something that’s interesting is the chief value that people look for in social media. But mediocre, gratuitous, anecdotal, surface storytelling is not successful. I don’t know that it ever was, but it’s really clear that it’s not successful now.
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How has the strategic role of marketing changed in your world, and where do you see it going by 2024?
Kevin Delaney: One thing that’s clear is that journalists went from just having to write things to effectively having to market the things as well. They have to make sure that they’re successful on social media. They have to make sure that the headline is really good.
“journalists went from just having to write things to effectively having to market the things as well”
Journalism has had to adopt some tactics at the reporter and editor-level of marketers. That’s probably the biggest example.
I think news organizations are becoming more savvy about using tools to get their content to the right places. As a result, it’s a little bit less reliant on an individual reporter’s scrappiness to bear that individual burden of marketing and self-promotion. It’s still important, but it’s becoming more organizational.
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Interview has been edited for clarity.