{"id":528,"date":"2015-01-09T10:44:34","date_gmt":"2015-01-09T10:44:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/new\/?p=528"},"modified":"2017-07-01T14:50:24","modified_gmt":"2017-07-01T14:50:24","slug":"amy-oleary-on-getting-the-audiences-attention","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/amy-oleary-on-getting-the-audiences-attention\/","title":{"rendered":"Amy O’Leary on getting the audience’s attention"},"content":{"rendered":"
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2014 speaker Amy O\u2019Leary, formerly of the New York Times and This American Life, has recently announced she is joining Upworthy<\/a> as the new Editorial Director starting February.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a recap of some of the advice she shared with The Power of Storytelling audience this fall about what journalists can do so that their stories reach and impact more people.<\/p>\n

Get into the feeds first<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cGetting into the feeds can mean anything, from making sure the right Google search turns on your headline, to caring about whether your news organization has an app that has alerts, so their phone buzzes when an important story happens. It could mean something that\u2019s simple, that any of you could do, which is having an e-mail newsletter. But it can also mean being on social media, and that\u2019s probably the most obvious example of getting into the feeds first.\u201d<\/p>\n

She gave the example of a New York Times article<\/a> titled Sierra Leone\u2019s Soccer Team Struggles With Stigma Over Ebola Outbreak<\/em>. When shared on social media, they used a quote from the story: \u2019You feel humiliated, like garbage, and you want to punch someone\u2019 – Sierra Leone goalkeeper on chance of Ebola.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s bringing emotion right into it, right?\u201d, said Amy. \u201cAnd the second one: \u2018No handshakes, no jersey swaps, the Ebola curse on Sierra Leone\u2019s football team.\u2019 These are two telling details with high stakes. Again, we normally save these techniques for our writing, but I think you can use them anywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rethink headlines<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cGreat headline writing is an art that we all think about, because it\u2019s traditionally the first way people encounter our stories. But now they exist very differently than they used to.\u201d<\/p>\n

She gave another example, of an article<\/a> that would traditionally run in the paper titled Adapting to Chernobyl<\/em>, but that taken out of that context wouldn\u2019t work. The article also had a video, initially called At Chernobyl, Hints of Nature\u2019s Adaption<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd this is the kind of thing that just doesn\u2019t do very well on social media, because what does this mean when you don\u2019t have the photo? What does this mean outside of context? It\u2019s really hard to tell, right? We had a very smart, very direct editor, who just renamed the thing The Animals of Chernobyl<\/em><\/a>. Everybody knows what the \u2018animals of Chernobyl\u2019 means, you\u2019ve got some pleasure in that, cause usually animal things are kind of delightful, and mystery, because you don\u2019t know: \u2018OK, what has happened to the animals of Chernobyl?\u2019 It\u2019s got what I would call embedded narrative question. It\u2019s so compact, but already there is a mystery involved.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meet your audience where they live<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cThere are a lot of subcategories on this. It can be anything from considering the best time of day to promote your story. If you\u2019re doing a story about Japan, maybe you should post it on social media when Japan is awake, when it\u2019s morning over there, not when they\u2019re asleep. If it\u2019s a story that will have a large overseas readership, what can you do to sort of translate some of the material for people who might be interested in it? How can you think about your reader and their day and what they\u2019re interested in, and then make sure the story gets in front of them?\u201d<\/p>\n

Help your readers tell the story with you<\/strong><\/p>\n

The example used to support this was of columnist Nicholas Kristof, that gathered some of his stories on sex trafficking done over the last 20 years, put them on a page called Inside the Brothels<\/em><\/a> and sent e-mails to 11 influencers – either actively campaigning against sex trafficking, or well known in this world, or people who had geographic connections to some of the stories.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe story went up and a bunch of Twitter traffic happened. And in the tweets that other people wrote about this page you had emotion, you had the sense of larger meaning, you had characters and anecdotes. We didn\u2019t write any of that. But this is the way that many readers first found these stories. So in a way these people on Twitter are almost like collaborators, and we didn\u2019t really talk to them. Some of these people had seen it three times on Twitter and then chose to share something themselves. But they\u2019re doing small acts of storytelling that propel the original journalism forward.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Amy\"<\/p>\n

The final advice she gave was to keep experimenting.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re just experimenting with all this right now, we don\u2019t have all the answers. One of my favorite quotes is by Alvin Toffler. He\u2019s a futurist, and he says \u201cThe illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who can\u2019t read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.<\/strong>\u201d And I want to share that because these answers won\u2019t be correct in a year, or in two years, or in three years. We all have to keep learning and experimenting, there\u2019s no single answer. And I would encourage you to experiment with your own stories in telling them earlier in the communication cycle with your readers and digital space.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The fourth edition of The Power of Storytelling took place in Bucharest on October 17-18.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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2014 speaker Amy O\u2019Leary, formerly of the New York Times and This American Life, has recently announced she is joining Upworthy as the new Editorial Director starting February. Here\u2019s a recap of some of the advice she shared with The Power of Storytelling audience this fall about what journalists can do so that their stories … Continue reading Amy O’Leary on getting the audience’s attention<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":882,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[24],"tags":[42,44,60,125],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=528"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3042,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528\/revisions\/3042"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/882"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thepowerofstorytelling.org\/edition-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}