How To Build a Better Story

From a journalism instructor named Mark Hamilton - this really caught my eye as a smart argument (and I am excerpting almost the whole post, it's that good):

I’m moving the prime publication of those classes from a weekly print publication to an always-on online newspaper and throwing into the mix a healthy dose of multimedia. Most everybody is saying it has to be done, that this is the way of the future, etc., and while I fall mostly on the side of the debate, I’m also convinced that doing this will make my students better print journalists.

I believe that for a number of reasons. One is that working to a much tighter, continuous deadline, they’ll become faster at turning coverage into story. A second is that they will be exposed to the reality that the most efficient way to tell many stories, both in terms of their time and the time of their readers, is through well-written, crisply delivered text. A third is that rather than having to stretch and pad copy to fill a set number of pages each week, they can give each story the size it truly merits. A fourth is that they will develop the ability to tell a continuing story in bursts and they will discover that most stories never really end. And a fifth is that they will learn how to focus on the important elements of the story and get to them quickly.

They will also learn much more about working beats and how to identify the storytelling potential of combinations of photographs or charts and graphs. They will learn, I hope, how to interact not just with sources but with their readers.

And, when it comes to all that multimedia goodness, they will learn not that podcasts or video are things the cool kids do, but legitimate ways of storytelling when appropriately used. I expect them, of course, to experiment like crazy and occasionally fail spectacularly.

I really like this argument; I think it does a better job of allowing stories to effectively communicate the reality of a situation as well as giving reporters the freedom to actually judge each individual story in terms of how much coverage it needs and how best to go about achieving that coverage, rather than work within constraints that were set down probably close to 200 years ago (or however long the print newspaper has been around).