Improv actors, a soundtrack and very little text. Is this the future of online journalism?
Consider what staid old Fortune magazine has been doing lately, in collaboration with the online magazine Flyp Media. Flyp has turned some of Fortune’s editorial content into imaginative multimedia features, like this piece on the Bernie Madoff investment scam. Fortune executive editor Steve Koepp told the AP, “It’s just an exciting new way to present the information to the reader. It’s a little taste of the future.”
Using Flash animation, video and other multimedia tools, Flyp has been telling stories online for about a year. The company is financed by Mexican billionaire Alfonso Romo Garza, a member of Forbes’ board of directors, who also funds the Spanish-language Web magazine Reporte Indigo.
Senior editor Matthew Schaeffer describes Flyp’s stories as “experiences.”
The idea isn’t just to write a story and then add a video or an audio piece. It’s to really figure out the best way to conceptualize these stories as multimedia pieces.
Flyp may have an advantage over traditional media companies because its material is published only online. No one there has to worry about how the story will look in the newspaper or on TV. But the magazine’s approach underlines the importance of thinking differently from the start when you’re planning to produce multimedia journalism.
