What newspapers can learn from Amazon.com

By Ellen Kampinsky, Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis

“It may be hard for us to believe at the moment, but people once defined the meaning of their lives by the stories they told one another.”

— David Denby, in The New Yorker magazine

Go to the movies today and you’ll see plenty of action and special effects, but you’ll have a hard time finding a coherent story. That’s what upset New Yorker critic David Denby. Denby lamented the lack of coherent stories in contemporary, action-packed movies. We have a similar complaint about the Web. The Web has content, it has material that is re-purposed, it has data — but where are the stories? Where are the stories that are being told in a new way appropriate to this medium?

In our opinion, the stories that are told in the best, most Web-specific way, are not on The New York Times site, or Salon.com, or Washington-post.com. The best job of storytelling storytelling can be found on Amazon.com

Why Amazon? To understand, first we need to look at what we mean by story. We are accustomed to the way stories are told in print and in the movies. We know the form and the vocabulary. In fact, traditional storytelling can be boiled down pretty simply, as it is in the New Yorker cartoon on page 17 by Roz Chast, titled “Story Template.” Chast’s cartoon says that the four elements of every story are:

Once Upon a Time

Suddenly

Luckily

Happily Ever After

The cartoon is funny because it’s true. It’s a shorthand way of reminding us that traditional storytelling is all about story arc and character development.

How is storytelling different on the Web? The Web uses all the tools of print, as well as those of video and audio, but it destroys narrative arc, character development and continuity. On the Web you lose all the strengths of Once upon a time; Suddenly; Luckily; and Happily Ever After.

The Web simply is not conducive to storytelling as we know it. Which is a shame, because good storytelling is transforming, and it conveys meaning. Yet the Web can offer a meaningful experience — just not in the traditional storytelling way.

The Web is about people, and people come to it with certain goals that they want to meet. If you help them fulfill their goals, you will create a meaningful experience.

The five user goals

In 1993, visionary Paul Saffo, head of the Institute for the Future, (www.saffo.org) defined a hierarchy of desires that people have when they use new media. Saffo’s hierarchy arrived before the Web explosion. Based on what we now know about user habits, we have identified five goals that drive all visitors.

Share: Think back to the 2000 Christmas season. What was the number one reason people got online? According to Pew Research, it was not to buy things, but to send e-mail. People wanted to experience the emotion of warm, human connectedness.

Inform: People have a need to know, which is why they come to news and weather sites, and why CNN.com and MSNBC.com are so highly rated. According to Web useability guru Jakob Nielsen, head of the Nielsen Norman Group, 96 percent of Web users are seeking information.

Create: This is the flip side of Inform and is one of the ways, obviously, the Web is so different. Think about any forum, or about our new favorite, Plastic.com, where users are creating content.

Entertain: Game sites certainly satisfy this goal but so does Shockwave with its animations, so do all the indie film sites, so does Ad Critic.com, where you can see the best TV ads of the week, and so does BMWfilms.com, with its insidiously wonderful film-commercial hybrids.

Transact: Two words will suffice: Amazon and eBay.

After these five goals, everything else is secondary. Now you may be thinking: I’m an editor, so I’m in the business of informing. But if you are going to create a meaningful experience, you need to consider all of your visitors’ goals.

And just knowing the goals doesn’t tell you how to satisfy them. For that, you need to know how to engage people and connect with them on the Web. That’s where a another set of five comes in: The Five Rules of Net Engagement. These five rules give you the tools to help people fulfill the five goals above, and they are based on what the Web does best.

Five rules of Net engagment

Network: The Web is the great distributed medium. It has no boundaries and it thrives on mass. Napster succeeds not just because it has music. Its strength is based on its network; the more people who participate, the greater its value.

Time and Place: In old media, you’re pretty much limited to one time frame, the past. A newspaper is an artifact, a snapshot of a certain point in time. But on the Web, time is fluid, it allows you to access the past and present and create the future, all at once. That’s why Mark Teflian, former CEO of Web consulting company Time0, says “Time is information. and information is time.” On the Web you can be both timely and timeless. Time also shape-shifts on the Web: How do you define “now” when the Web exists in an ever-changing present that embraces 24 different time zones?

Interactivity: This is the great differentiator of the Web. It’s what Jakob Nielsen means when he says that “Doing is more memorable, and makes a stronger emotional impact, than seeing.”

Data: Nowhere else but the Web do you have the opportunity to provide so much data; it’s literally limitless. You also have a plethora of data types — such as audio, video and Flash files. You can also categorize data in virtually limitless ways — from an object-oriented relational database to markup languages such as XML.

Personality: This is something people tend to forget about on the Web. Because the Web is still fairly new, we’re all trying to figure out which designs and schema will work best. Most Web developers tend to copy a few successful sites — and so everyone ends up looking like everyone else. But when you consider the immensity of the Web, the billions of pages out there and the ubiquity of information, the only thing that is going to set you apart is creating a personality, a voice that mirrors who you are. That’s why successful sites have a personality, why a Suck is different from a Yahoo and from a Flowerbud.com

Thus, the Five Rules of Net Engagement. You are probably using one or two of them on your site, perhaps even all five. But are you using them in the optimum way? That brings us back to Amazon.

Amazon has mastered the vocabulary of the Web. It engages all five goals — share, entertain, create, inform and transact — and it uses all the rules: network, time and place, interactivity, data and personality.

So, what if we told stories the way Amazon sells books?

A sports example

Take a minute to look at Example 1 on page 18. Notice that it employs all the tools that Amazon uses to sell books, to tell a story in a new way.

At the top of this page is the URL, which, like Amazon’s ISBN numbers, works as a unique identifier for this sports event. The unique identifier is what makes Amazon so successful, because it allows the site to bring together all the disparate pieces of information that hang off or contribute to our understanding of a book. The same thing can be applied to a sports event or any news event, so that even as the story changes, there is still something to pivot around, and a way for readers to find their way back. In this way, the so-called story becomes a product, or an object.

Also notice that what appears on the page is determined by a set of reader preferences — just the way Amazon works. It assumes the reader is a Dallas Mavericks fan, but if the reader makes choices that show that he or she is Knicks fan, different elements would appear.

Here’s how the five rules and the five goals play out on this page:

Personality: This page has the personality of a game; it’s fast, brash, energetic. The copy is lively. “Knicks squash Mavericks.” “It was a gut-kicking.” Reader comments abound. Headers are direct. ESPN is among the other sites mentioned on this page, and rightly so, given their NHL slogan: Every game has a story.

Time and Place: Under the lead item, readers learn the amount of time it will take to read the story and when the story was posted.

Time also comes into play in the Season at a Glance feature in the center, as well as in the items about the previous games, today’s games and the next game. And of course there’s a calendar, which makes use of offline and online network of TV shows, player appearances and coach chats.

Note, however that nowhere on this page is a time stamp that says “now.” That’s because this event-object is always changing — as the story evolves, as readers contribute to the page and as time marches on. As for “place,” this page acknowledges the Web’s lack of boundaries by gathering articles from all over the U.S. — from the Fort Worth paper, the New York newspapers and from ESPN.

Network: The Web is made up of people, the more the better, and this page brings people together. One device is showing how the story is ranked by readers. Another is the note telling where this story is most popular; for example at Electronic Data Systems’ offices and at the University of Texas — thus, ranking by geography. As we’ll see later, there are other ways to rank.

Why are reader rankings important? In February, Editor & Publisher’s “Stop the Presses” columnist Steve Outing cited a study at Penn State University in which people were asked to judge the quality and credibility of a news article on a Web site, based on whether the story had been selected by an editor or by readers. The story chosen by readers was deemed higher in quality and credibility, even though it was the same story as the one selected by an editor. (If you’d like to read more about this study, see Outing’s column at: http://www.editorandpublisher. com/ephome/news/newshtm/stop/st021401.htm)

This page also tells you what other stories network members are reading. And it gives you a reward — points — for sending this article to someone else.

Interactivity: Speaking of points, notice that this page offers some points for doing passive things like reading the story, and higher points for interactive tasks such as e-mailing the story to a friend or participating in a forum. The points then become redeemable for merchandise or to purchase content. And the page is set up for micro-payments. Transactions also can be customized, depending on whether the buyer is a Mavs or a Knicks fan.

Creating certainly is interactive and here visitors create in now standard ways, such as in the Talk About the Game feature, as well as at a higher level, by fashioning what the story, what the page and what the Web site itself looks like — and this happens every time they click a link, send a comment, make a decision.

Data: This whole page is about immersing the site visitor in data. Just as Amazon mines its own databank of books, reviews and rankings, this page seeks out every instance of useful information and brings it up to the reader.

Note that there is no story here in the traditional sense. That’s because the story is what the user makes up from the elements he or she chooses.

Also be aware that nothing on this page is blue sky. It combines applications and content now being done by Amazon, ESPN, the Mavericks site and Dallasnews.com

A news example

What about a story that is not so easily broken up as a game story? This hard-news page (see page 18) hews even more closely to the Amazon model.

This example builds not around an event, but a topical issue, because while stories are changing, issues transcend. This issue, the controversy over an U.S. Attorney General nomination, is the starting point from which to hang data, reader questions and feedback.

So on this news page, the narrowly-focused story, at top center, is little more than a headline with related links, including one to a full-length text piece. More important, just below the top summary are opinions and a live vote, which are integral parts. At the very bottom is the so-called story-story, which is really a synopsis.

Time and Place: This page acknowledges the universality of the Web by posting the story with the Universal Time Code or GMT.

Network: There is also a readers’ ranking and story ranking — in this instance showing that the story is popular with conservative males aged 35-55 in Southern California. So here you have a psychographic rather than the geographic ranking. Reader comments, of course, foster the sense of Network and Interactivity. You’ll find that readers who read this story also read pieces at washingtonpost.com. And, harking back to the Penn State study, readers have the choice of browsing related stories.

Personality: By highlighting a reader comment on the page, we show that feedback is as imporant as the lead story. Here you have readers defining the personality of the page.

Interactivity: On the right side of the page, notice the View Cart, so readers can buy merchandise or more content. And they can further interact by saving the story, sending it, or setting up a favorites list. And of course there is a poll and a discussion area. At the bottom, left, readers rate the stories.

Time: On the right side of this page is a teaser to tonight’s TV show about the Attorney General issue, with a “Remind Me” button. And on the lower right, an up to the minute tabulation of how many points the reader has accumulated.

Data: The elements shown on the left, under Explore This Story, feed the user’s obsession to know more about the topic. The feature on the left labeled “Readers Also Wanted to Know” turns reader queries into a way to broaden the story.

To encourage a long life for the topic and page, readers are encouraged to explore related stories from the archives and from other sources.

As you move around this page, you see an organic landscape of opinion that grows and changes. And because it is organic, over time the page will grow — or, if there is no reader interest, die.

But good stories never die. And as these examples show, on the Web, storytelling isn’t dead. It’s alive, and well —and different.

Kampinsky is a senior editor with Talk magazine. Bowman and Willis are designer/authors at hypergene.net

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