Digital Storytelling with a Victorian Diary

On Monday I said goodbye to a friend fom 124 years ago. 

When my Great Great Grandmother, Minnie LeCraw, was 21 she kept a diary with brief daily entries chronicling life in rural Indiana of 1888. The diary has been passed down through the family and many people have read it to catch a glimpse of who she was and relive the adventures of a young school teacher.  Her handwriting is beautiful. The book has a handsome leather cover. And her Victorian, one room school house setting is inviting. But the thing is....  it is really boring. 

Each daily entry was no more than three sentences, often filled with abbreviations, initials, and mentions of mundane activities.  You can quickly read an entire month of seemingly disconnected sentences.  It begins to feel repetitive. 

But I was convinced there was a compelling story in here. I wanted to experiment with a new approach at the narrative that would capture it.  What follows are the three evolutions in content product concepts. So far the tangible output is not much better than an amateur blog. But the process has inspired me to imagine a very intriguing storytelling model.

Power of Daily Serials

As an avid reader of daily comic strips, a fan of old radio dramas and good television dramas, I recognize the potential of serialized content.  When written well, this can be a great narrative device to make the audience wait between installments.  So last year when I noticed that the 2012 calendar lined up with the 1888 calendar, with matching dates and days of the week, I decided to try blogging the diary one entry at a time, on the same "day" that it was written.  So on Sunday, January 1, 2012 I published the following entry:

"Sunday, January 1.  Watched the New Year in last night.  Parted from F. at half past eight — reached Bethany about ten and taught Sunday School class as usual.
I helped entertain callers in the afternoon and attended service at Bethany church again at night.  It  has been a pleasant day, but I wished for one more hr. at home."

minnielecraw.wordpress.com

This immediately made it more interesting.  As family and friends learned about the diary blog, some began visiting daily and others signed up to receive each post as an email.  Programmed to be delivered early in the morning, I personally loved reading the daily diary entry each morning waiting for my train.  I know others who read it out loud to the family at breakfast.  The routine became part of the story.  

Why did the serialization work?  Because that is exactly how it was written. Minnie LeCraw sat down each day and wrote a page in her diary as a single, contained content unit.  

Down the Rabbit Holes

The next step in the story was adding layers to the raw content.  As I read and share the diary, I have two objectives. I want to learn something about the author and also get a glimpse into a historical time and place. 

At its face value it is difficult to get a good image of Minnie LeCraw or life in 1888 Indiana just from the words she wrote.  The diary entries are brief.  There are many disconnected passing references to people and places that are meaningless to the reader.  She was not writing this for an audience, presumably just herself or her family who would know the backstory of the people and activities she recorded.  But for readers today it needs context.  So I began to add content.  

First I created four top-level pages that introduce Minnie and other characters that appear in the story and describe the locations and setting so that readers could enter the diary with some background. 

• Who Was Minnie LeCraw? 
• Meet the Other Characters
• Learn About the Locations in the Diary
• Indiana in 1888

These took some investigative work to determine who the 120 different people were that she mentions over nine months, often only by first name, and their relation to her and each other.  She also visits at least 12 different locations throughout the year.  I used genealogy sources, scanned historical books and records, local histories online, and the most valuable, scanned property maps from the 1870s and 1890s. These often included both biographical sketches of some prominent pioneer families of those counties as well as detailed township maps that I could cross-reference with current day Google maps. I was able to uncover who many of the people were and what the towns she lived in looked like at that time.  In fact, the town where she boarded and taught school has long since vanished. Finding where Bethany of Parke County, Indiana was the first mystery I needed to solve.  After hours of studying maps and old photos, when I drove through the town of Waveland for the first time ever this past July I felt as if I was visiting an old home.

Comparing historical and current maps

Next I began to look closely at what she was saying. I realized there could be an interesting story in almost every sentence.  When something caught my eye, I would do a little research and add a post script "Editor's Note" to the blog post providing a little background, links to additional information, and the occasional image if it was directly related to something described by Minnie.  My added notes included biographical sketches of neighbors, explanations of school administration policies, descriptions of what everyday objects and events where in 1888, and analysis of historical and modern maps to pinpoint buildings and compare locations today.  A seemingly straightforward sentence, upon further inspection, could almost always send me off on an illuminating research adventure.

One early instance was her sentence: "All day the low hung clouds have dropped their garnered fullness down."  It sounded too poetic compared to other sentences, so after some digging online I found that it was likely a quote from a poem.  This poem was only (as far as I could find) published in a 19th Century primer textbook, and only in the 5th edition.  She probably used that textbook in her classroom.  Google has scanned that edition so I could see the page of the actual book.  Fascinating.  In that process I caught a glimpse of Minnie and the past.  But I'm not sure the words of an editor's note could quite capture it.

Examples of entries with editor's notes that were an experience just to research: 

• February 16: Reading a Dickens book
• March 5: Traveling by train and handcar between small towns
• April 6: Distribution of one-room school houses and identifying a likely location of where Minnie taught.
• April 10: Going to the small town opera house
• April 23: Indiana State Normal School
• April 27: Getting a teaching license
• May 17: Trying to find out what meeting she attended in the county seat
• September 25: Visiting the future President

Parallel Narratives

The diary project as described above ended on October 1, with the final entry made by Minnie on that day in 1888.  I added notes to more than a third of the daily entries.  The overview pages have been expanded with research and analysis of people and places mentioned within the diary pages that I was able to piece together some of the story of her life.  I determined that she boarded with the family of her older sister and that she had been living with them and moving across the state for several years since her parents had died.  I now have a pretty good guess for where and when she met her future husband, my Great Great Grandfather, whom she was frequently writing letters to and traveling on trains to visit that year.  Both of these facts were unknown to her grandchildren, who had originally shared the diary and their family notes with me.

While the daily format and the extra content layers made the diary a more interesting experience, it still doesn't tell the story I think it can.  It doesn't even present the story that I personally experienced through poring over old maps, tracing her walking routes through fields or trips on old train lines, getting to know the people in her life, picturing the church gatherings, community events, and imagining who she was at that point in time.  My understanding of what a young woman's life would have been like in rural Victorian Indiana was challenged and is now much richer.

But how can that story be told?  Daily blog posts with extra links is a nice exercise, but it still does not capture the messages.  I think there is a third step in evolving the story.  I want to combine the compelling nature of the daily serial and the contextual layer of notes and links with the strong linear narrative of a book.  I imagine parallel narratives that unfold together but at different levels.  One that discusses the surprising and meaningful themes that her life illustrated that year, such as the independence and limits of women without families, the immersive role of the church within small towns, and the rhythm of life in that era.  There is also a narrative that is essentially the story of a town--getting to know the people of 1888 Waveland, Indiana, visualizing the place, stepping back in time.  And finally there is the narrative in Minnie's own words.

I admit I don't have this product figured out yet.  It may be an ebook, an another type of website, an app, or some other new digital format that would allow for the appropriate pacing and depth of the stories.  But regardless of what it is or when I get around to creating it, I am excited to tell this great story.

Final Thought

The purpose of even beginning this project was to capture the story of my Great Great Grandmother in a way that can be enjoyed and shared by my daughters, cousins, and family members that now spread across the globe.  I debated publicly publishing someone's private diary, but the content is much more about journaling facts and events than recording personal thoughts.  The strong, independent 21-year-old Minnie LeCraw in 1888 is a valuable story to capture and share with many.

When the Entertainment Product is a Live Spectacle

This year's summer Olympics are the first to occur in the age of social media, and given that the United States' viewing audience is several hours behind Greenwich Mean Time, the inevitable tape delay question arises.

Of course this is not the first time the Olympics have been shown on delay in the U.S., not even the first time in the era of new technology.  The games in Seoul and Barcelona were before the rise of the Web, but cable news was already redefining the news cycle to be 24 hours, instead of the controlled broadcast and print schedules.  By the Sydney Olympics in 2000, NBC had to deal with an extreme time lag and the early use of the Internet spreading news and information outside of the media's control.  This only increased with the Athens and Beijing games as technology improved (mobile, streaming video) and the culture became more expectant of real-time information.

There may be some irony that part of London's opening ceremony celebrated the rise of this culture, yet this may be a threat to the current economics of the Olympics that are still based on the old business model of mass advertising to a captive and controlled audience via licensing to broadcast channels.  There has been much discussion as to whether that is a still a valid business model (ratings are still high...) or whether NBC is decreasing value instead of adding it, or if the entire ordeal is just too commercial.  But let's ignore those arguments for the moment and assume that there is a business model that will work for NBC and the IOC that supports a real-time product instead of the traditional prime-time package.  Do I actually want that as a consumer?

I fully support the news industry reinventing itself along with technology to provide a more real-time product with better use of technology, even if it means painfully blowing up some business models (or watching new market entrants disintermediate some traditional leaders.)  And I am excited by the potential of television and movie entertainment moving to an on-demand experience.  But what are the Olympics?  And other sports for that matter?

I believe they are primarily an entertainment product, but with elements of news baked in.  Sports, especially on this scale, are a spectacle.  They are events packaged as products.  In theory, if the drama is good enough I would enjoy watching them on demand, separated from the live timing.  This sometimes works.  I have been recording football games for years and watching them at a later time when I am unavailable to watch as they originally air.  There is a tiny loss in the experience, as part of the spectacle of sports is sharing the event, even if remotely, with other people simultaneously.  So tape delay can work.  It is a bigger loss, though, if I already know the outcome.  I never watch the entire recorded football game if I hear the final score in advance.  So tape delay with leaked results is a much reduced experience.

So what should NBC or others do with something like the Olympics?  While they could simply broadcast every event live and optimize distribution and audience through the latest technology, I'm not sure this would be an improvement.  Because most people still have inflexible schedules even in a real-time culture, the full entertainment experience could not be consumed as it happens.  It would be treated more like news than an entertainment product to be enjoyed.  There is still a lot of value packaging the spectacle.

In this case, I do not see an obvious way to package and present the Olympics with our current culture and technology possibilities and limitations.  The current mix of breaking news throughout the day, optional real-time broadcasting of events, on demand replays, and a nightly packaged product is probably the natural equilibrium.  Although it requires individuals to decide how they want to consume the product and personally navigate some of the conflicts. (In other words, try to avoid seeing results during the day in order to preserve the nightly experience, or to find time to watch more events live during the day.)

Despite the challenging puzzle, the Olympics are fantastic content.  There will surely be incredible innovation around packaging and distributing that content, and other sports, in future years.  I am excited to see how the next games held in a distant timezone are presented and consumed.  It's sure to be in even more dramatic fashion.

Publisher Brands for Content Discovery, Not Distribution

Publishers are being disintermediated in their role of content gatekeeper for their audience.  As a consumer, I am not limited in my choice of articles or books to read by the decisions made by editors at my local newspaper or one of the few national publishers.  Their judgment was a necessary value in a world when content was scarce and distribution was a barrier.  But content is no longer scare, with exponentially more options, and I cannot possibly consume much more than I am now.  So I still need help deciding what to read.

When a speaker announced at a January book conference that more books were published during that week than in all of 1950 I was not really surprised yet taken aback at the same time.*  I have so many more choices as a consumer, and content is being created and published that would never have seen the light of day in the past.  Some of it must be more relevant to me than what was traditionally chosen for more mass audiences.

So how do I find it?  The wisdom of crowds lover in me wants to believe that quality will rise to the top. The population will find what is good and elevate it better than any small crowd of trained editors or physical retailers ever could.  But in reality I can't see that effectively working, especially as my definition of quality content includes what is personally relevant.

This is why I believe the personal discovery process for content is the biggest opportunity right now.  There is a lot of innovation happening across all types of content.   Some companies are focusing on algorithms using simple user inputs (Google, Amazon, Netflix, Zite), and others are looking for social connections to find more relevant content (Facebook, Goodreads, Spotify.)  Most are beginning to incorporate both aspects.  All of those companies I just mentioned do a decent job of finding new content specifically for me.

But what about those publishers with their teams of editors who used to pick what I should read?  Do they still have a role in this world?  I think they just might.

While they cannot ignore the trends toward personalization or they will be completely left behind, they do have a head start over any technology upstarts at understanding specific audiences and communities.  And more importantly they (at least for the moment still) have the ability to fund and sponsor content creation.  Publishers appear to be losing the battle of distribution--other companies are doing it better, in more personalized ways--but they still have brands that mean something to audiences.  The same great article has more weight under the flag or The New Yorker than it does under noname.com.

So how can publishers use this brand equity? A recent announcement from Forbes might be one example.  They are asking contributing writers to take responsibility to build their own individual audiences online with content that goes beyond what appears in the standard publication.  And they are compensating them for it.  This allows Forbes the ability not just to expand their total audience, but to sponsor many more content creators than they would have before and add more support, especially financially, to those that appear wise to the crowds.  It works for the contributors by giving them the Forbes banner and promotion to give them a boost to be noticed in the increasingly saturated sea of content.  And it will benefit me, the consumer, but highlighting content choices as Forbes-approved if I believe their brand is appropriate for me.

I expect we will see more ideas like this from publishers, not just in news, but in books, music, and other entertainment.  They will focus more on their brand and using its equity to facilitate the discovery of content for their audiences, especially for those with specific, defined, even niche audiences.  This could even be done without publishing or distributing actual content.  No one has figured out how to monetize their brands separate from distribution-based business models yet, but it is inevitable as they are forced to reconsider their very missions and look at where their value truly resides.

UPDATE: Here is a recent example of blogger Joshua Gans, someone I have enjoyed for several years, moving over to the Forbes brand. http://gametheorist.blogspot.com/2012/03/new-parentonomics-blog.html



* I have not fact checked this statement, but considering the explosion of self publishing and publishing upstarts and opportunities, the idea is surely correct even if the number is not completely true.

Ho Hum, Students Do Not Really Want Digital Content

According to a survey of college students, "if all things were equal (price and availability), students would choose to use e-textbooks 47% of the time" versus print text books.  The knee jerk headlines are that good old fashioned printed text books are still favored by a lot of students, so slow down all of the predictions of the revolutionary market.

But what if this survey is done five years from now, with students who have lived in the world of iPad since they were pre-teens?  I bet it will be much higher.  And when my kids (ages 2 and 5) are approaching college, or even in high school after living with advanced mobile devices their entire remembered life?  I'm sure they will be much closer to 100% than 50%.

So given the time to develop products and markets, I would bet right now on demand for a totally digital text book. 

This reminds me of when I was in college in the mid-late 1990s during the earliest adoption on the Internet.  Here is a study from 1997 that looked at whether college students would want to use email and computers for education.  The conclusion?  There's not a big demand from students.  Even "when students are given large incentives to use e-mail, over a quarter of the students in one class did not." 

Transitioning to the New Equilibrium

Following up on yesterday's post, it is not hard to see an upcoming rebalancing of ad spend per media, with even more significant dollars shifting from print to online and mobile.  To review, where advertisers spend their budgets to place their messages is not yet proportional to where consumers are spending their time.  I assume this was more or less in balance for years between print and broadcast channels, but overall advertisers have been slower to shift habits than consumers from print to online.

There are surely many reasons for this, including uncertainties and undefined opportunities of an emerging market, risk tolerance, and general inertia.  Online and mobile (especially) ad markets are just not as developed as print.

But let's play out this scenario and assume more perfect market conditions.

Assumption 1: Consumption habits stay roughly the same for the next few years.  (Just to keep this easy, but we know mobile will increase and print will likely continue to decrease.)

Assumption 2: Total ad spend stays the same, or at least we are playing a zero sum game.

Assumption 3: Advertising adjusts to match where consumers are spending some time.

Conclusion 1: Print media would see more than half of its advertising disappear.  A lot of it would reappear in mobile media and some to online.  I'll call this the normalization of ad spend.

But that still might not be the right equilibrium.  I half joked when I mentioned that half of traditional advertising is wasted, per the infamous quote.  Well, is that untrue?  A fair amount of print media is still produced for a broad, if not mass audience.  The same can be said about broadcast.  But the Internet (and mobile) platforms naturally create more personal, and therefore more targeted, content and audiences.  It is reasonable to believe that once the ad markets develop, the Internet and mobile media will be more effective on average than print.  So...

Conclusion 2: The new equilibrium will see an even further drop in ad spend to print media to the benefit of Internet and mobile.  Is it unreasonable to imagine this scenario where ad spend in print drops to a sixth of what it is today?

Of course, this implies disaster for print publishers.  In this scenario only the ones that are truly niche and targeted would retain an audience useful for advertisers.  But in reality almost every print publisher today is in the midst of transitioning audience to online platforms and products in hopes of serving them in targeted ways so that they would simply experience this shift internally from one platform to another.  But even if they do successfully transfer their audience online, they can't just publish as a digital version of a print product, they have to compete against the millions of other websites, aggregators, and personally targeted content available to consumers.

Thankfully for transitioning publishers, these markets are far from perfect so this scenario is not going to play out overnight.  There is time and hope.

(Note: my data with calculations and estimates are available here.)

UPDATE: I am not the only one who has drawn the same conclusion, The Washington Post has as well and it is getting a lot of attention.  I have had the 2009 version of this chart on my wall for two years as a conversation starter,  so I have to say I am surprised it took this long for some one else to notice the same thing and make noise.

The New Equilibrium of Subsidizing Media

Advertising spending is expected to significantly grow this year, according to a report by eMarketer.  That is great for media--both producers of and consumers of.  That is in the aggregate. Within categories we are looking at continued, permanent realignment.


The other headline within the report is that 2012 will be the first year that total online ad spend will surpass print ad spend.  Of course, that is not surprising as innovation is rapidly occurring in digital media--still on the web and even faster with all of the mobile and tablet device development.  And consumers are adopting, flocking to, and loving these new ways of consuming content.  The only headlines about print are seemingly about shrinking circulation and attempts by publishers to switch their readerships to online before it is too late and they are lost to new digital competitors.

This also has been forecasted.  In Mary Meeker's online trends presentation from 2010, there was an ominous and unavoidable slide that showed the time spent per media by consumers against the ad spend by media by advertisers.  eMarketer's updated report from December 2011 shows the continuation of the trend. The obvious conclusion is that advertisers are still spending a disproportionate amount on print media compared to where their audience is.  And given the old saying that half of mass advertising is wasted, and online advertising at least promises a more targeted approach, it is reasonable to expect the equilibrium of ads to consumption should actually have a higher digital spend proportionally at the expense of print.  So 2012 may simply be the inflection point.

So the growth of advertising, and therefore the subsidization of media growth is a great thing.  Media is not dead. Even journalism is not dead.  Money is out there for life and growth, it just won't be going to the same balance of players as before.  As a consumer, I'm fine with this.  As a traditional media participant, this is the serious challenge and new reality.

Unsupported Device: Exclusively Packaging News

Although it is not unprecedented, I was momentarily taken aback when I followed a link to The Economist Group's new election site and was told that "It looks like you're trying to access Electionism from an unsupported device." The funny thing is, I was using a newish PC laptop running the latest Firefox browser.

The reason, of course, is that this is a new tablet app, and because it is a web app (designed in HTML5 and avoiding Apple's App Store) it has a URL, but is not designed for non-tablet browsers.  I am sure there are other examples, and there are surely many more examples to come.

The interesting aspect here is how to look at the product.  Is it content?  Or just packaging of content?  Without spending much time with it, I assume it is the latter.  Based on my quick sample, most if not all of the content comprising the site is available elsewhere (sources include The Economist, CQ Roll Call, and twitter feeds) and this is simply a new way to package it together and design the UI for slick tablet navigation.  But if in fact there is unique content, or if the combination created in this environment is compelling enough to tell a unique story, what does it mean that the publisher is excluding the majority of its potential audience?

It might not mean much.  It is a reward for tablet adopters, who are probably among their most loyal customer segments, and this platform gives them an opportunity to experiment and innovate, which we all know publishers need to do more.  And with limited resources there are trade offs of where to spend development energy and dollars, so cross-platform products are not always feasible.  There is also no special advertising or paywalls as of today, so the product does not have a price for consumers or a revenue stream for the business.  It might just be a case of a new platform allowing for a new package of content given different consumption habits of tablet users.

Coincidentally, today also saw the news that The Daily will soon be available on some Android devices.  While it will no longer be limited only to the iPad, it will still only be available to consumers with tablets, which is a very small slice of the total news market, especially for The Daily, which is a more general interest publication, but is creating a lot of original content exclusively for the product.  Again it is a strategic bet on the market by Rupert Murdoch, that while I think it has a slim chance of succeeding, it just might work if they innovate on story telling and packaging and have good enough content to win readers over as they adopt the new devices and see that their current news providers are a step behind.  Of course, other publications already producing similar content could quickly catch up by learning how to package and adapt storytelling for new platforms and audiences with changing consumption habits.  We'll see who wins.  If we look back 10-15 years we can see the rise of CNN.com and Yahoo news as news destinations over newspapers online that were slow to learn how to produce and package content differently for new platforms.