Traditional media companies pride themselves on journalistic storytelling with an emphasis on the written format. But what many media companies are continuing to learn is being traditional doesn’t always cut it in 2024. 

Audiences are increasingly asking for more formats, whether that’s with audio, graphics, video, chat, or AI. All of these alternate storytelling formats make up what’s known as multimodal storytelling — many modes of telling a story.

During a recent INMA Webinar, Beyond Text: Coming to Grips with Multimodal Storytelling, Product and Tech Initiative Lead Jodie Hopperton and Newsroom Transformation Initiative Lead Amalie Nash talked to INMA members about making multimodal storytelling a part of newsroom culture.

Nash began with a look from the newsroom perspective where communication about different formats cannot be an afterthought.

“It needs to be built into your story planning process, your daily meetings, your conversations between journalists and their editors,” Nash said. “People need to understand what the tools are, they need to have training, they need to know what is available in terms of the different formats they can have, and they really need to be asking a lot at the front.”

Waiting to think about multimodal on the back end creates a risk that media companies won’t have the information they need to tell stories in different ways. If it’s talked about up front, Nash said, newsroom teams can collect information differently and ask better questions like: 

What is the story? How is that story best told? Who’s the audience for that story and in what format does this audience like to consume content? How do the different formats work together? Are they complementary or duplicative?

Hopperton included a look from the product and tech perspective when it comes to providing the framework to build and deliver stories. 

The product and tech side has to think about the cost versus the impact of the format, ask what the user needs are of the current and target audiences, and consider the distribution channel. This will dictate a lot about what a company can and cannot do with different formats. The product and tech team will also have to align with the newsroom about what is the measurement of success and what KPIs they’ll use to measure success or failure. 

If companies are really serving their users, the audience may dictate what is the right format to consider. Media companies may find that one alternative format works well or a mix of a couple of formats might work for the current or target audience.

“We have to prioritise,” Hopperton said. “We have to think of the skill sets that are needed, what it takes to deliver that ongoing support. It’s so much better to do a few things really well than to do many things [in a] mediocre [way].”

While newsroom and product teams may be coming at multimodal storytelling in different ways, they must work together. Problems occur, however, when the newsroom doesn’t have the tools to do what they need to do and the product team creates exciting things for multimodal the newsroom doesn’t use.

Story formats

Nash provided a look at a guide specifically used to think about multimodal more in day-to-day planning. Here’s how she believes newsrooms need to approach their decision-making:

1. Define the story.

2. Define the format.

Nash said she likes to see the format conversation happen early on. Media companies can ask better questions at this point: “Is this a written story. Is it better told in a different way? Are there other formats? What are the multimedia elements? How are you going to reach the intended audience for this story?”

3. Get down to specifics.

4. Publish the story.

5. Measure the results.

The questions that are important to answer to measure success are: Did this reach the intended audience? What were the KPIs? How did it perform against traditional storytelling? What are the learnings for doing this day to day?

Hopperton walked attendees through how to decide what formats they should build. Here are some topics she wants them to consider:

• Audience: Existing or new? Subscribers or everyone? Where are they? Do they get what you’re doing?
• Cost: To experiment, to build, integrate and support. “It’s rare that we launch something and then it’s just done. We need to make sure it stays up-to-date, it works, so let’s look at the entire cost,” Hopperton said.
• Distribution: On- or off-platform, can you produce for both?
• Revenue: How do you monetise?
• Measurement: How are you measuring ROI? What are the goals of using the new medium? 

Newsday focuses on visual storytelling

INMA members also heard from Rochell Sleets, managing editor at Newsday, where they’re making a big effort to train all employees in visual storytelling.

Newsday, based in New York, has created a six-week course for all new employees that includes a look at the tools available to them as they tell stories. There’s also talk about how to interact with the social media team to present content in engaging ways.

To measure success of their alternative storytelling methods, Newsday looks at engagement time as a metric. 

“One of the biggest ways to tell if it’s successful is how people engage with it, so the time people are spending with the content, we’ll have interactive charts and maps and searchable databases so people are touching different access points,” Sleets said. 

Newsday also created what they call a features grid — a tool that operates as a searchable database where people can easily find the content they’re looking for. They wanted it to be easily consumed by the user and started off integrating it into stories. What they found was when they separated out the features grid into its own content, it actually brought in more traffic. 

Daily reports show how the audience is engaging with these formats is shown at Newsday, which has allowed the newsroom to more easily embrace the changes.

“Once you have something that is working, that is successful, everyone wants to be a part of that,” Sleets said.

Alma Media creates vertical video product

Alma Media in Finland created a new product aimed at supporting narrative storytelling through vertical videos, graphics, and social cards. They created the product, Il Palat, which is an INMA Global Media Awards finalist. The project came about in conjunction with the newsroom and product teams.

The goals were for Alma Media to reach a younger audience, provide a good avenue for advertising, and create a multimodal newsroom culture.

Nash explained how the revenue piece is executed.

“In the product, advertising is incorporated between parts of these stories so you can see that they have different types of stories published weekly — it’s everything from explainers to viral videos,” she said.

Alma Media has seen incredible growth with the Il Palat video platform. And, as Perttu Kauppinen, editor-in-chief at Alma Media, explained, while they first saw a lot of growth with their videos on social platforms, they wanted to bring more people to their own channels. 

Alma Media was invested for a while in video storytelling, first on Instagram and Facebook, and then on TikTok, Kauppinen said. They saw tremendous demand for videos but questioned the rationale behind producing content on social sites.

“They don’t drive any traffic to our own platform, which means the revenue is practically non-existent,” Kauppinen said.

They chalked up their social media presence as a marketing play until 2022 when they noticed a Swedish tabloid newspaper was showcasing social media icons on their homepage. They got the idea to start producing videos and other social content for their own channels. 

Success didn't come easy or early. The beginning was difficult, and the team tossed around the idea for months before pulling the trigger. From a technical perspective it took two to three months to build the product. As the largest news site in Finland, people were used to using their site in a certain way. Users typically went to the front page, clicked the headline, and read. 

“If you bring something new to the front page, no one sees it and that was really the difficulty,” Kauppinen said.

It took a few months for people to start noticing the new product. Now, on average, Il Palat sees three million video views a week. They have an average of nine million video views on their other content, so Il Palat increased video views by one-third.

Kauppinen referred to their video approach as “quick and dirty” since they found expensive production wasn’t worthwhile. Kauppinen also warned media companies to be sure they differentiate themselves from content that doesn’t come from legit news sources. Alma Media makes sure to still look professional and trustworthy. 

One element they’re still working on is getting advertisers as excited about the Il Palat format as they and their audience is:

“Large advertisers have separate teams and separate budgets for purchasing video advertising and social media advertising and this is something that falls between those two classes,” Kauppinen said. “We really have to work more on selling this to advertisers. It hasn’t been that easy.” 

Svenska Dagbladet reaches new audiences with podcasts

Ebba Linde, senior product manager for Svenska Dagbladet in Stockholm, told INMA members that getting new products to new users is a challenge.

“Working together with the newsroom to really identify who are the target audience for this initiative is super important in order to find the best way to deliver it to our users because otherwise we tend to just serve the users we already have,” Linde said.

If they’re going after a new audience, media companies have to be more intentional about how they deliver to this audience. Svenska Dagbladet wanted to see if they could use an audio format to attract a more digital audience and decided to experiment with podcasts.

They toyed around with delivering the podcast within their own platforms but quickly realised if the task was to find a new audience, that probably wouldn’t work. They instead chose to publish to Spotify and other platforms and then saw that 60% of audio streams were from new users.

This approach wasn’t making money, so next they put the podcasts behind a paywall on their site and were happy with how many people bought subscriptions to get the podcast content.

The creation of the podcasts, however, were still proving cost prohibitive, so they added an audio element within written articles online to see if that added value. They’re now in the process of seeing if this is creating the value they’re after.

“The user feedback that we get ... it’s really positive,” Linde said. “Now … how do we scale this in a cost-efficient way? So we are looking into AI voice cloning.”

The company also is looking at ways to distribute this to more users and how to test the willingness to pay for a written article being read out loud.

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