When cleaning up my digital scrapbooks I came across a photo I shot with my laptop camera back in 2009 at the NewMediaDays conference in Copenhagen. It’s a slide that was shown by the guys behind Vice Magazine who were invited to speak about how they created a very successful print publication in a time where hardly anyone can.

The quote stuck with me for a wile, and eventually came back today, and I think it’s very similar to the way we approach things at Storyplanet, and how I personally think every storyteller should approach the digital revolution. Of course we need business models and revenue as well, but if you create difference an make a change in the world you can also find a way to make a living.

For those of you happen to pass by Washington DC and have a soft spot for journalism and technology the Newseum is a great place to spend a little time. They have a lot of interactive things you can play with. One of the ideas I was inspired by is a video kiosk where you can select a story you would cover, and then as you go along the “game” you are presented with different dilemmas. For instance you are covering the famine in Sudan, and you see a kid that is clearly in dire need of help and might die. So do you engage or do you stay as the observing reporter? You can also watch video interviews with professional journalists talking about what they would do in the situation.

When Magnum Photos in 2004 brought me on board to work on digital formats and new business models, one of the things I suggested was to explore how we could ask for private donations for specific projects – what has later been dubbed “crowd funding”. I was very inspired by the music industry where a bunch of underground bands financed their records through online donations (something that later inspired giants like Radiohead). But I was probably too early with the idea, and no one at Magnum picked up on it. So  I was extremely exited when I recently discovered that one of the Magnum Photographers, Larry Towell, had launched a crowd funding project through Kickstarter.

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It seems like everyone is trying to figure out how to do online magazines these days (especially on iPad). But most attempts are still really first generation in my opinion, and maybe we have to drop the idea of a “magazine” and just try to invent a totally new form that’s not taken from the old world of print.

However one of the examples that I still think work really well was one of the first ones I came across: Inquiring Mind Magazine – They have stuck to a rather simple concept of page layouts, but mixed in some brilliant elements that are only doable online, like great audio, and small video players etc. And the graphics and design is just beautiful.

Screenwriters that are able to come up with amazing stories can make a world of difference – this is one example from the French media empire Canal+

As the traditional revenue from newspaper sales have eroded more and more the hunt for making money online has intensified in the media industry…or at least the talk about what might work. One of the hyped things is micro payments – the idea that readers and viewers can pay for a single piece of content in an easy way. One of the few working examples is Apples iTunes and the in-App-store options that makes it possible to do subscriptions and sell content inside iPhone and iPad apps. The latter has let to a stream of new magazine and news apps from old media organizations. But is micro payments really the savior? Obviously I don’t have the answer, but I think there are some good arguments that it might work – if someone in the media industry was actually ready and able to execute a good micro payment product and strategy. Read More

A new year is here and like everyone else we tend to do a bit of status here on Storyplanet. So I looked back and found five storytelling projects that gave us great inspiration in the past year (the might not all be from 2010 but that’s when we came across them). Happy New Year!

1. Storming Juno: http://www.stormingjuno.com/
This site is based on a Canadian TV-documentary about the D-day invasion, so from the onset the quality of content was great. But the people behind the project has done an awesome job at repackaging the TV-content to an interactive online format, and paired with some hight quality motion graphics work as well as great design and navigation it all comes together to a beautiful project – which by the way also works great on a technical level with streaming, loading, resizing etc.

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When looking at the media consumption it’s clear that there is a huge demand and support among consumers for great storytelling. So maybe a business model for journalists and other storytellers could simply be to ask their audience to support them directly. This is called crowd funding and there is an increasing hype around this concept, along with a myriad of startups offering the platform to do it. Here is a list of 13 of the industry players: Read More

After having experienced four failed hard drives in less than three years (I have loved all my Mac notebooks, but their drives are not the strong side) I have become pretty aware of the little annoying thing called backup. So what is the best solution if you are on the road constantly, and are editing a lot of heavy footage like video and photos using external drives? Read More