Delicious Today: digital storytelling, emotional geography

Today is the last day of my summer internship at CPB. I have had a wonderful and productive time here. I'll keep posting "Delicious Today" on a weekly basis. Thanks for reading and sharing.

#1: Jim Gaines: Magazines Need to Embrace Multimedia Storytelling in Digital Age
#2: FLYP: multimedia magazine

"Gaines has had a long career in magazine journalism. ... Gaines came back to long-form publishing with Flyp Media, an online publisher of magazine-style content that combines video, audio, Flash animations and interactive features. Flyp was created as a proof of concept, financed by Mexican media mogul Alfonso Romo, and is only now starting to look for advertising and business partners."

I tried a few stories on the FLYP website and think it's one of the best digital storyteller I've ever seen. The design is sleek and clean. The delivery technology is easy to use and intuitive. It's really like reading a print magazine. You even get that "whoosh" sound when you flip (click) from page to page. But best of all, the multimedia components -- audio, video, animation -- are used judiciously thus feel natural as part of the storytelling. This is a rare case of happy marriage between content and technology: they seem to have surpassed the stormy early years of marriage and evolved into a comfortable partnership. Public broadcasters have a lot to learn from FLYP's experiment.

#3: Emotional Geography explained by Daniel X. O'Neil of EveryBlock
#4: Emotional Geography: list of resources

"Emotional Geography is a concept I’ve had for a web-based application that allows people to create customized maps with highlighted points of personal interest."

This is an intriguing idea for public broadcasters to rethink what "local" means and how to serve different "local audiences." When technology has broken down the barriers of space in communication, local stations need to get out of the habits of thinking local only as a physical location, and thinking audience only as residents living in that location. We all have multiple "local" communities: our neighborhood, our friends scattered around the country and the world, our work connections who reside in one industry but many geographical locations, etc. So the concept of emotional geography makes a lot of sense and should be helpful in stimulating new programming and growth strategies for stations. Take the Washington Post for example, it "has begun to embrace the idea of defining itself not as the newspaper of Washington, the physical entity, but as Washington, the idea."