Storytelling tools

We try not to teach to tools overmuch because the hardware and software you use today will soon be changing — the curse and joy of working in a technological field.

At the same time, though, I like to share what’s available to you in the hopes that you’ll play around with a few of them. In doing so you get a little more exposure — Another skill/platform/material you can brag about! — but also it might keep you from being scared off by something new.

With that in mind, I give you 15 free tools for better online storytelling, which gives you potentially new ways to use data, manipulate maps and showcase images.

How many of these (or similar) tools have you used so far?

Conde context

Sometimes you have to find a series of stories and read them together to get the proper context. Here are two recent business stories from Conde Nast that illustrate that point:

Condé Nast aims to unify tablet and mobile magazine production

Condé Nast plans to digitize archives for tablet long tail

The first story is simply a savy move. And if their track record is any indication Conde will do well here where some have succeeded and others have failed. Ultimately, look for their magazine design to ultimately look like a hybrid blend of their print and tablet products.

About the second story: the folks at Conde are very progressive and very sharp. Long tail planning has to do with the effect of probability in customer use. The more you have online, the more people will find it through your site, through your archives, through latent social media links, dormant sites and the always important search engine.

Just this weekend a friend was telling me that some 40 percent of his business, ancient photographs and hi-res posters for purchase online, comes from the long tail. Archives are a good thing, even if you have to go digitize your analog material.

There’s always an audience.

Disclosure: I previously worked for a Conde Nast sister company.

Social media a traffic driver on smart phones too

We’ve known for a while now that a lot of news is pushed through social media — engaged by a trusted community, our friends and family, we follow the links to news and other information on sites like Facebook and Twitter. But the previous studies have been generally observable about our desktop behavior. Poynter notes some recent studies on mobile traffic use as well:

U.S. mobile or tablet app users spend 30 percent of their time in social networking (second only to games at 49 percent), while news apps capture only 6 percent of total time, according to newFlurry Analytics data.

Nielsen data from Android phones showed about eight of 10 people used the Facebook app in a given month — making it the most popular app except for the Android Market itself. Google found that social media, along with games and e-mail, were the most common activities for tablet users.

All this means social media is essential not only to your Web strategy, but your mobile strategy as well.

News apps, though, shouldn’t be considered a wasted effort. They are generally geared to the most news-hungry elements of your audience. Pew research suggests people utilizing news apps are “power users.”

Apple and tablet reading

Poynter: Why Apple’s virtual Newsstand is driving a surge in magazine, newspaper iPad app subscriptions.

(P)ublishers are reporting similar experiences with a Newsstand bump. What’s going on here? In part, discoverability and convenience.

Khoi Vinh: ‘I just can’t see the end-to-end magazine format surviving’ for iPad apps’

“Some folks will continue to like the magazine format, but as social distribution becomes the way we discover and receive more of our content, it won’t make sense to sell it in these virtual boxes any more,” he tells Jack Marshall. Instead, publishers should try to package content based on relevance, a goal that remains elusive.

Alan Mutter: Paid news potential limited on tablets.

The potential for selling news through applications on iPads and other tablets appears to be “limited,” according to a study released today.

Although consuming news on a tablet is one of the most popular activities discovered in a survey of 1,200 tablet users, only 14% of them had subscribed to a paid news app, according to a study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism in collaboration with The Economist.

Of those who haven’t paid directly for a news app, “just 21% say they would be willing to spend $5 per month if that were the only way to access their favorite source on the tablet,” said the study. “Of those who have news apps, fully 83% say that being free or low cost was a major factor in their decision about what to download.”

Designing your app

Jeff Sonderman on rethinking news apps:

News organizations whose mobile apps only provide users with their articles or videos are missing a big opportunity.

An application, by definition, should be applied to perform a task, to solve a problem. Most news doesn’t do that.

Rather than just feed readers recent stories you wrote about their problems, apps can provide tools and data that enable users to actually solve their problems. When you solve problems, you get more loyal users and a chance to make more money. Here’s how.