Ann Friedman was executive editor of GOOD until last summer, when GOOD’s cofounders famously laid off the site’s editorial staff. Friedman and several other former GOOD staffers launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund Tomorrow, a collaborative journalism project to create a single-issue magazine.

With editing stints at GOOD and The American Prospect behind her, Friedman is now embracing the freelance life. She writes weekly columns for New York Magazine and Columbia Journalism Review, curates the Tumblr blog Lady Journos, and posts hilarious animated GIFs on her Tumblr blog #realtalk from your editor (a companion to her CJR column). She also delivered the closing keynote (cleverly illustrated with GIFs) at the Power of Narrative Conference in April.

Ebyline recently caught up with Friedman to find out how she jumped into freelancing, why she loves GIFs, and what she learned from cofounding Tomorrow magazine. What follows is an excerpt of that conversation, edited for clarity and brevity.

Had you freelanced before the layoffs at GOOD?

Before I got myself suddenly unemployed, I described myself as an indoor cat. I only worked in staff positions, and I’d mainly made my living as an editor. Not only had I only had staff jobs, but I had never really tested my ability to produce the volume of writing it requires to be a freelance writer. That was not the plan.

It actually was a great asset to me that I was an editor first. I had an innate sense of how to make editors happy and—let’s be real—editors are your employers when you’re a freelance writer. They’re the ones who greenlight the things that you want to do and they’re your internal advocate when your check isn’t coming. Editors are your most important relationship when you’re a freelance writer.

What are some of the strategies that make editors happy?

Something that would always drive me nuts is when writers would get indignant about my response time or about the fact that I was juggling so many different things. It seemed like there were some writers that didn’t seem to grasp how many demands on my time there were. It’s almost like editors are standing in a room full of screaming children running in a million different directions.

I always try to be respectful that there are many demands on an editor’s time and understand that I’m never going to be priority number one. I try to think of my editor as my ally. A lot of it goes back to having a great respect for the craft of editing and being willing to collaborate with editors.

You’ve become known for animated GIFs. Do you think that they’re a fad? Or are they here to stay?

The GIF is just another tool among many, many tools that journalists have to help punctuate their work and promote their work. I use them as a way to unite the high- and lowbrow. A lot of my friends who are photographers are starting to make great photographic work with GIFs. You can do a lot of different things with it. Not everything is the joking, goofball GIFs that I embed in my CJR column as a way of lightening up what would otherwise be a pretty heavy topic.

What were some of the lessons from working on Tomorrow?

One lesson was community is powerful. It was an amazing community that supported us by funding us on Kickstarter and promoting our work after Tomorrow came out. I don’t think Tomorrow would have come about if we hadn’t cultivated a group of readers around the work that we created prior. People love the idea of being part of what we were about with Tomorrow. We paid everyone something. It wasn’t fair market rate, but everyone involved with the project got paid which is something we’re really proud of. People didn’t do it for the money. Most just wanted to be involved with the project.

If I had it to do over, I would have loved to work with someone in a publisher role. All of us are journalists. We lived on the editorial side. It’s pretty hard to put your business brain on and your editorial brain on at the same time. So if we had it to do over, I would have tried to enlist help from someone to handle our business stuff from the outside.

A new crop of journalism grads is about to enter the workforce. What’s your advice for them?

Find some way to do the thing you’re excited about. Sometimes that means picking a crappy day job that doesn’t meet all of your journalistic goals. Take those jobs, even non-journalism jobs, and pay your bills. Then use the huge amount of resources available digitally to create a one-off Tumblr or collaborate with a group of people on a reporting project.

There’s a feeling among a lot of J-school students that they feel stuck in a city regional reporting job that’s not that fulfilling. I actually think there’s never been a time in journalism when it’s been more possible to do this other thing on the side. I don’t think that journalism accurately prepares journalists to be entrepreneurs in the way that most of them are going to have to be if they want to be successful.

Photo by Stephanie Gonot

Video seems to be the hot new thing in print publishing. Between the recent Newfronts, and efforts by the New York Times, which took down its video paywall, and the Huffington Post to get in on the ad dollar pie for digital and streaming video, everyone wants to better utilize and monetize video. The International News Media Association even released a report that reviews the industry’s efforts thus far, and offers tips on making video work for traditional newspapers.

This attention to video as a new digital revenue stream has opened up the door for entrepreneurs ready to pounce. One longtime music industry executive, Steve Gottlieb – who founded independent record label TVT Records and launched the careers of musicians like Nine Inch Nails – has translated his experience with live musical performances into the creation of a live chat platform, Shindig, which offers authors and publishers the opportunity to monetize the broadcast of those live events. The company, based in New York City, is currently in beta.

Shindig, the live chat platform

Although numerous video chat platforms presently exist, Shindig is unique in that it provides a customizable shared space online for authors and publishers to provide virtual book tours, readings, talks, presentations, press conferences, interviews and more with up to 1,000 attendees. In addition to the speaker, 20 fans can be seen at a time. Google+ hangouts doesn’t come close in terms of scale. To compare, G+ only allows for 10 attendees and provides no options for charging to attend a hangout.

Drawing from his musical background, Gottlieb sees potential for Shindig to offer a new live event revenue stream for publishers and online content providers.

“There is nothing like the live experience of a musical event, that sharing of not just the event, but the venue and time and place and being there beforehand and afterwards,” Gottlieb said. “This is a great way for online media to broaden their reach and create excitement, a great way for authors and writers and bloggers to create multiple platforms through interviews and events around their content. In a way, this is a media creation platform.”

Gottlieb started thinking about developing a live chat platform after watching his son play games online with people he didn’t know. The lack of identity “just kind of gave me the creeps,” he said.

Shindig shares the names of all participants and gives attendees the option of turning on their webcams and appearing in the live chat room, which is visible to the speaker and all attendees.

Speakers can share the virtual stage with a chat participant or use the second space for a presentation or a video. If participants have questions for the speaker, they can click on the hand-raise button, and the speaker can bring him/her onto the stage. Attendees can also start private video chats with other participants by clicking on the image of that person. All live chats can be recorded and published on YouTube.

Advertising, sponsorship, and new revenue stream opportunities

The author or publisher of a given Shindig live chat has the option of offering free chats or charging participants a fee to join by using online event registration system Eventbrite.

Currently, there are no up-front costs for early adopters of Shindig, but if authors and publishers monetize their events through paid sponsor and branding opportunities (which could include customizing the background image in the live chat room), charging for events through Eventbrite ticket sales, or selling merchandise during an event, Shindig asks for percentage of the revenue.

“Right now, advertisers are limited to a banner or the side of a webpage. The ability for advertisers to get in front of a live audience might be worth more than a whole lot of banners. Sponsorship of life experiences has always been much more engaging for advertisers,” said Gottlieb, adding that video chat offers a viable opportunity for online media organizations and magazines to expand their reach and get to know their audience better.

Gottlieb provided examples of recent Shindig live video chats from Guy Kawasaki, who spoke on how to publish a book April 4, and Bill Gates, who spoke at Concordia College on April 27.

While many newspapers have cut back on long-form journalism due to shrinking page counts and budgets, stories running thousands of words are finding a home online thanks in part to platforms like Longreads and Narratively.

Last summer, a group of New York City journalists led by Noah Rosenberg raised over $50,000 on Kickstarter to launch Narratively, an online storytelling platform focusing on New York City’s untold stories. Since launching in September, the site has published long-form articles, photos, and multimedia work created by media professionals with credits at The New York Times, CNN, NPR, and other top-tier publications. Websites including Salon.com, BuzzFeed, and Huffington Post New York regularly syndicate or feature Narratively stories. Earlier this month, TIME named Narratively to its 50 Best Websites 2013.

Rosenberg, Narratively’s founder, is a frequent New York Times contributor and a spring 2012 fellow at The City University of New York’s Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism. Ebyline recently chatted with Rosenberg about his vision for the platform, Narratively’s evolving business model, and more. What follows is an excerpt from that conversation, edited for clarity and brevity. 

How has your vision for Narratively changed since you launched?

We launched here in New York and then after X amount of months we planned to add an addition in Los Angeles or Paris or wherever. I’m still interested in that concept, but I’m also interested in potentially creating a parallel site that’s more global.

Narratively’s Kickstarter video, which describes Rosenberg’s original concept

The core principles of doing these beautiful untold stories that aren’t getting the time they deserve elsewhere and of course exploring this one theme a week and one story a day is a huge part of what we do. At the same time we’re a small and agile organization so we’re really tuned in strongly to what our readers want. We’re certainly willing to address that and make any changes that we think are necessary. 

Has your focus shifted beyond New York?

Back in February, we started occasionally publishing a story from outside New York. That’s a way for us to test the waters and see what the response is. Are there different bloggers picking us up because of that? Are different publications requesting the syndicated content because of that?

As long as these stories are really beautiful stories that we think deserve to be told, I think there’s a place for them on Narratively. We certainly don’t want to restrict our platform to New York only so the big challenge, one we welcome right now, is just trying to figure out how these other places factor into that overall direction of Narratively.

What is Narratively’s business model?

We’ve been selling ads. Much like we have this one theme a week, one story a day approach, we’re also working with one brand at a time exclusively on the website as a way really to potentially deliver an impact to them.

But what’s really grown actively in the past month or so has been this content agency we’re building. We have this devoted, talented community of three hundred plus writers, filmmakers, photographers and illustrators. We’ve been leveraging this community and taking on projects for outside clients. Everyone nowadays is a content producer but not everyone has the capability in house to create that compelling content. It’s a win-win because it allows us to generate higher paying work for our contributors and subsidize this editorial engine we’ve built. That’s something that has eclipsed advertising overnight and it’s continuing to grow rapidly.

Syndication is something we’re trying to grow as well. Beyond that, our monthly event series is ticketed and sponsored as well. I’d love to be able to kind of harness the power of our whole community and do Narratively storytelling workshops where we can approach brands and companies and institutions and teach them the craft of storytelling that we’ve perfected here.

Can other freelancers contribute to Narratively?

A hundred percent yes. That’s something that’s really amazing to me is that this weekly or bi-weekly email we send out to our contributor list constantly is growing. We’re adding new names every single week. We’ve created an online contributors form that’s soon going to live on our website.

One thing that’s really important to me is that not only do we have people on board who have written for the New Yorker and for Vanity Fair, we also are giving a voice and opportunity to the younger storytellers who maybe haven’t gotten that New York Times byline yet but have the passion and the know-how to be at that top level. In a way we can become a launching pad for their careers as well.

Featured image caption: Dr. Dave Ores, who offers pro-bono tattoo removal for ex-cons. (Photo by Per Liljas/Narratively)  

The promise of running video on news sites has been just around the corner for about a decade now. With technology cheap, and bandwidth to spare, news organizations—and newspapers in particular—have reasonably assumed they could compete with broadcast and cable news. Assumed is the key word: while ad rates on digital video remain well above typical rates for text and photos, few news organizations—broadcasters included—have successfully navigated the switch to digital. A report by the International News Media Association sheds some light on why online video has failed to deliver and delivers some common sense advice from the successful few.

The report, Making Video Pay For News Publishers, is only available to INMA members or for a pretty penny on INMA’s website. So here’s a bullet list of what we considered the most intriguing opinions in a white paper that included data on ad rates, various content and selling strategies and interviews with publishers who have gotten it right, sometimes after years of struggling.

Stick to your strengths

If you’re in the publishing business you have a brand and an audience that knows you. Stick to the areas you’re already good at: hyperlocal, sports, business, whatever. Don’t use the new video cam as an excuse to dabble in content you don’t know, and that your audience isn’t expecting from you.

“Whatever you do with video, it has to be very honest to what your brand represents,” Suranga Chandratillake of Blinkx, told report author Paula Felps. “If your audience is 22-year-olds who are very edgy, they’re going to find it odd to be watching a guy wearing a tie sitting behind a desk.”  Canada’s Globe and Mail leveraged its strength in business coverage to produce Market News segments (that could be easier to find). The Daily Telegraph is serious, the Financial Times less formal with its videos.

Go all-in, or don’t bother

“Every medium- and large-sized newspaper could be playing this game tomorrow,” says Michael Rosenblum, president and CEO of RosenblumTV and founder of New York Times Television. “But they’re not.”

Mastering video is similar to mastering social media: dive in and learn what you need to to do it right. With local broadcasters losing eyeballs, advertisers are keen to buy space where those eyeballs have migrated to. (The report cites a typical ad rate of $25 per thousand views for pre-roll and other advertising that’s incorporated into the medium.)

Be honest about costs

Video equipment, and the technology needed to distribute it online, is cheap and getting cheaper. But you still need to spend money to make money and too often news organizations dip a toe by opting to spend little up front in the hopes that money earned on video will have a snowball effect and pay for its own growth. The INMA report suggests that isn’t working. Instead, news organizations that make the modest investment in know-how and equipment will be overcoming barriers to entry in their niche or geographic area. And the investment can be very modest.

Australia’s Fairfax Media is dedicating big resources and hiring broadcast veterans for its online video units while The Guardian and Wall Street Journal are making more modest investments by re-training staff. The Toronto Sun has purchased Canon cameras that shoot video and stills simultaneously. Many U.S. newspaper chains have embraced so-called backpack journalism. Local newspapers are experimenting with new models of what a reporter can and should be.

Featured photo by NASA Goddard Photo and Video via a Creative commons license. Additional photo by Movieing Memories via Creative Commons.

The big news in newspapers this week is that paywalls are starting to pay off for some of the bigger-circ publications. The latest data released by the Alliance for Audited Media (AAM – formerly known as the Audit Bureau of Circulation) indicates that while overall circulation figures for papers nationwide have gone down, major papers like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal have seen a boost in their total circulation numbers, in no small part due to their boost in digital subscriptions, which now account for almost 20 percent of all daily circulation.

One caveat to these cheery figures is that AAM allows newspapers to count individual subscribers who have both a print and digital subscription twice, as multiple media commentators have pointed out.

So where do these papers actually stand then?

With the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) recently releasing a Nielsen study they sponsored about consumer media engagement that reports newspapers have the highest “trustworthiness” among readers, and highest audience engagement with content and advertisements, it would seem the newspaper industry is out in full force to prove it still has efficacy – especially to advertisers.

The New York Times, among some other papers, could use a boost in advertising confidence. The paper’s Q1 earnings fell flat, with a 93 percent drop in revenue compared to the same time frame a year ago. Granted, these figures failed to include properties that the Times Co. sold at the end of 2012, but they still fell short of projected earnings. Likewise, advertising revenue was down 11 percent to $191.1 million from $215.2 million in Q1 2012.

Investor confidence is also down, with stock price of the NY Times Co. slipping this week, despite news of circulation bumps.

There’s no doubt that with all of the ways readers can access and share the news, quantifying exactly how large a given paper’s readership is can be immensely difficult. But measurements are only going to get messier.

In October, AAM will no longer require newspapers to submit a five-day average of their circulation figures for audience measurement and auditing, which has long been the standard measurement. This means that even a somewhat reliable indicator of audience size will be hard to come by, let alone comparable between papers.

Perhaps then newspapers will be left once again with but their strongest suit to deliver them advertising dollars: their ability to tell (or spin) a good story – this time about their reach, audience, and influence. Legacy and trustworthiness may help too, but only for so long.

It’s time for a new metric.

The task of reporting an investigative story for the Los Angeles Times may have its share of adrenalin-rush ‘detective’ moments – going under cover in a coffee shop to watch a corrupt doctor prescribe narcotics to his patients; kayaking to the back of a man’s house to get his side of the story; even tracking down a Boy Scout pedophile to a rural truck stop in Canada – but the bulk of the work usually takes place in front of a computer, scrubbing public records and databases.

That’s what LA Times’ reporters Jason Felch, Lisa Girion, and Scott Glover described at a panel on accountability journalism at the Los Angeles Times 2013 Festival of Books in downtown L.A. Moderated by the Times’ self-declared “chief cheerleader,” editor Davan Maharaj, the panel also included insight from California investigative editor Julie Marquis. Here’s a look at some of the main points the panel made about watchdog journalism:

Gathering and curating data is key (and time-consuming).

With a team of only 3 full-time investigative reporters, Marquis has overseen the production of numerous high-profile investigations in recent years, including coverage of the Boy Scout “perversion files,” which examined 1,900 files documenting sexual abuse cases kept by the Boy Scouts of America from 1947 through 2005.

For the Scouts investigation, reporters Jason Felch and Kim Christensen spent the better part of a year combing through confidential files and building a publicly accessible database of abuse cases. Many of those cases had never been reported to the police – or even to the victims’ own family decades later. The result was not only a series of eye-opening reports about the lack of background checks required for the Boy Scouts organization, but the most comprehensive published database of these records.

Investigating a story about a prescription drug epidemic in Southern California, Lisa Girion and reporter Scott Glover spent two years building and cleaning up a database with over 9,000 lines of drug data that needed to be translated into hydrocodone components. Much of their two years of research was spent adding data pulled from death reports to a massive excel spreadsheet. The resulting database revealed patterns and painted a clearer picture of who was dying from prescription drugs, and from where those drugs were coming.

“No one had quantified the role that physicians play,” said Girion. “That’s what we wanted to do.”

Never assume a subject won’t talk for a story.

During the Festival of Books discussion, Felch described how he collaborated on part of his Scout story with reporters in Canada, and eventually managed to track one convicted child molester, who had served as a scout leader and then gone underground, to a rural motel in Canada.

To his surprise, the man in question agreed to speak when confronted, and fully admitted to molesting boys in California and Canada. Their interview lasted for three hours.

“I was out of questions after two and a half hours,” said Felch. “I was exhausted and disgusted but he just wanted to keep talking.”

Girion wasn’t surprised by that fact.

“I find that remarkably common among pedophiles,” she said.

For her part, Girion has a knack for getting suspects of her investigative reports to open up. Her tactic? Explain to subjects that this is their opportunity to air their side of the story; the subject is the only one who can explain what went on from his/her perspective.

While reporting on the prescription drug epidemic, Girion admitted to staking out a doctor who refused to talk by waiting outside of his office for hours. When that didn’t work she and her team kayaked to the back of his house. Ultimately she got him to talk.

Finally, have a great editor.

Girion and Glover ultimately published only 15% of what they know about prescription drug related deaths in Southern California. They said they hope they reported the best, most interesting 15% of the story, but it took a team and a keen editor to help them choose what to ultimately publish.

Currently up for sale by the Tribune Co., the LA Times is facing almost assured cuts over the next few years, and Marquis says she has to fight to keep her small team of reporters focused on their big stories so they don’t get pulled into the newsroom for daily coverage.

For all of the good that watchdog journalists do with their investigative reports – prompting the enactment of new laws, taking down corrupt officials and institutions, even freeing those wrongly accused from death row – their numbers are dwindling. If there were ever a time for legacy publications to keep innovating to find ways to bring home both Pulitzers and the buck, that time is now.

Featured image by Florence Ivy via a creative commons license. Panel Photo by Sarah Erickson.

Newspaper paywalls have gotten a lot of attention recently, with The New York Times tweaking its paywall and others, including the Seattle Times and Washington Post, jumping on the bandwagon. But it’s not the only way that publications can charge readers for online content. If digital subscriptions are the news equivalents of Pandora or Spotify, then the alternative (often called a la carte journalism) is analogous to buying a song or two on iTunes.

The startup approach

One experiment in a la carte journalism wants to be just that, the iTunes of news. Salem, Mass.-based CrowdNe.ws is now in beta and offers a marketplace for journalists to sell directly to readers on a per-article basis. “We are flooded with so much information that we don’t really want or need,” says CrowdNe.ws founder and CEO J. Michael Wheeler. “I spend a lot of time on my RSS feeds saying ‘No, I don’t want to read that.’ People do that in traditional media. You open up The New York Times and thumb through 5-6 pages before you pick a story to read.”

Wheeler is a serial entrepreneur who taught the first multimedia course at Parsons Paris School of Art and Design in the mid-1990s. The fledgling site’s prototype includes an essay written by current freelancer and former Inc. magazine contributor Alessandra Bianchi and is available for whatever readers want to pay via PayPal.

How much will each story cost when the site actually launches? CrowdNe.ws is still experimenting with pricing. Wheeler says they may allow journalists to set their own price or use market pricing where “the more popular the article is, the more expensive it is when you purchase it.” He believes that if a story covers a topic that readers find valuable, they will pay for it. For instance, coverage of a local high school sports team or a journalist covering the tech world from Paris.

The mainstream media approach

Several more established media outlets have also dabbled in selling stories a la carte rather than by subscription. In November, Wired Magazine released its first WIRED Single. John McAfee’s Last Stand sells for $.99 through the Wired tablet app or on the NOOK or Kindle platforms.

The Wall Street Journal sells ebooks (some of them earlier stories on the same theme packaged together) and premium videos through iamplify, a web-based content publisher and syndication network. WSJ’s products range in price from about $3.99 for an ebook to $34.99 for a video in its Executive Leadership Series.

As we’ve previously mentioned, Gothamist published a 13,000-word feature article and sells it as a Kindle Single, iBook, ePub, or PDF for $1.99. Individual journalists like former NYT contributor Mike Albo have also used the Kindle Single platform to sell longer-form single stories directly to readers.

The challenges

Alan D. Mutter, a newspaper consultant who writes the blog Reflections of a Newsosaur, says the a la carte model has potential, especially if content producers adopt an aggregated payment system like the Slovakia-based Piano Media or U.S.-based Press+. That way users don’t have to set up several different accounts and open up their wallet each time. “For me individually, having to get out of my credit card to pay 23 cents, is not a great business model,” he says.

But for nascent startups selling a la carte journalism as CrowdNe.ws plans to do, Mutter sees bigger challenges. “It’s certainly a noble goal, but the problem is for a startup is to both aggregate the content and aggregate the audience and bring things to some scale,” he says.

Whether indie publisher or massive media conglomerate, metered paywall or a la carte, content is still king. “At the end of the day, it’s about the caliber of the content,” says Mutter. “We know people will pay for content that they value but they need to attract new readers, not just the people who already love them.”

With the rapid migration of news and media onto the mobile platform, newspaper editors are finding all sorts of ways to keep up with the changeover and stay ahead of the trends. That’s why Randy Parker, managing editor of the York Daily Record put a tablet or smartphone into the hands of its top reporters. Further, as Parker explained at the America East 2013 newspaper conference in Hershey, Pa. they take those tablets on the road and into the community to experiment with news ways to boost reader engagement.

Parker explained that several years ago his newspaper hired Lauren Boyer for a new position to cover business news focusing on consumer issues, but he didn’t want her to stay in the office and instead tasked her with finding new ways to tell stories for the paper. York Daily Record gave Boyer the first iPad it bought, and she used it to shoot videos and tweet. Today she still finds new apps and tools to download and use on a weekly basis.

“It was one of the best investments I could have ever made because it absolutely energized her, and it accelerated her creative thinking,” Parker said. “I noticed every time I look over at her desk, she’s not there.”

Boyer’s tactics integrated social media use and traditional reporting – allowing her to venture into the community, meet new people and still stay connected with the newsroom. Often Boyer would send out a tweet that she was going to be at a particular location and invite people to stop by and tell her what she should be covering. Parker explained that a local public relations representative from Harley Davidson who was hard to get a hold of found her that way one day and chatted with her for around 45 minutes.

The second person on staff at the York Daily Record to receive an iPad was the paper’s senior reporter who covered the courts. The judge let the reporter use the iPad in the courtroom because it doesn’t break any of the court’s rules.

“[The judge] said, ‘Well, there’s no cellphones and no laptops, but this isn’t a cellphone, and this isn’t a laptop, so, yeah, I guess you can use that in the courtroom,’” Parker said. “This was a new judge. I think he was looking to bend the rules to new technology.”

The court reporter uses Scribble Live, which lets him live-blog the proceedings and sends his updates to Twitter.

Parker said he has gradually rolled out iPads to 14 staff members. In addition, the paper has purchased six Nexus 7-inch tablets for photographers, and he predicts the paper will continue to purchase Nexus tablets instead of iPads because they’re less glitchy, fit into “boy pockets,” and they are “dirt cheap.”

The paper has tried Kindle Fires and Windows Surface tablets, but they never caught on.

York Daily Record also created a “News Vroom,” an old newspaper delivery van that goes to sporting and other local events from time to time. Workers erect tents around the van that house six laptops, six smartphones, six iPads, and a WiFi router that allows connection to up to 21 devices. The paper uses the mobile connection to showcase the newspaper’s apps at events that draw crowds: its e-edition for iPad, its iPad app designed to focus on breaking news, photo streams, and methods for sharing information like Little League game scores.

Next up for the York paper: developing a pre-fall high school football tablet e-zine and a commemorative Gettysburg anniversary edition for tablet.

Photo courtesy of Digital First Media.

While many sessions at the Power of Narrative Conference in Boston last week discussed abstract ideas about storytelling and voice, Laurie Hertzel’s session called Narrative Glue gave attendees six you-can-actually-do-this tips for crafting better narratives. “I’m your practical grunt for the day,” quipped Hertzel, who is the books editor for the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Here’s an overview of her advice.

Write with a camera angle. To make the reader feel like he or she is in the center of a scene’s action, think like a moviemaker, suggested Hertzel. “Aim your camera at what’s important and use different lenses, pan around the room, show a couple of people in motion,” she said. This allows the writer to zoom in one person or action and zoom out as needed to move between actions or people and tell the story in a dynamic way.

Use both scene and summary. Beginning writers are told to “show, don’t tell” (perhaps because they do too much of the latter) but Hertzel said it’s necessary to do both, showing through scenes and telling through summary. “Scene are used when you want to put readers in the moment,” she explained. “Summaries cover spans of time and stitch scenes together.” Summaries also give readers information they need to know but don’t need to actually see.

Use telling details and metaphor. Scenes should unfold moment by moment but the journalist needs to carefully choose which details to include. In the opening of a Star Tribue article about a troubled teen, reporter Larry Oakes includes the fact that the teen’s dog is unnamed, which serves as a telling detail. With each scene, Hertzel said journalists should ask themselves, “Why am I telling this scene? Who are the main characters? What happens and why is it important?” She added that description should fold into action so it becomes part of the movement of the scene, like in a New York Times story about two elderly sisters begging on the streets of Brooklyn.

Vary your pace. “You don’t want all scenes to move at the same steady pace,” said Hertzel. Shorter sentences and a clipped pace creates urgency and drama in a scene with a lot of action, for instance, while longer, more detailed sentences create a slower pace and allow the reader more time to process.

Move forward and backward in time. As long as it doesn’t confuse the reader, Hertzel said, it’s perfectly fine to move forward and backward in time. A New York Times piece about a mother forced to choose between throwing her baby to a stranger below or losing her in a fire moves between descriptions of the stranger’s high school football career, him racing outside to the fire and the scene of the fire itself. The central question of the piece—what does the mother do?—isn’t resolved until the very end of the piece.

Know where to end your scene. In transitioning between scene and summary, Hertzel recommended pivoting away from the scene during a powerful moment to keep the reader interested and keeping the summary short enough that it doesn’t frustrate the reader. A New York Times article about the stresses of working as an air traffic controller skips ahead to summary at several climactic moments. Scenes that drag on for too long can bore a reader. “You want the reader to keep moving into end of scene,” said Hertzel.

As online publishers chase clicks, some rely on gimmicks to boost traffic, while others use more innovative formats. During a standing room-only breakout session on Friday afternoon at the Power of Narrative Conference in Boston, New York Times reporter Amy O’Leary explored these boundaries.

In Genius Moves, Cheap Tricks and Story Killers: An overview of some of the latest techniques, approaches and strategies, O’Leary shared examples and solicited audience reactions to several others. Publishers are “trying to figure out how to monetize journalism,” she told attendees. “It’s a scary landscape with a lot of unknowns and people are trying a lot of things, which is exciting.”

Here’s a look at the stories and strategies O’Leary shared.

Story killers: Clichés are a common story killer, said O’Leary, citing tear-jerking backstories about Olympians who’d lost close family members and wind chimes as the opening image in a video as all-too-common tropes. “That sad music comes up, there’s a sad person sitting on the couch,” she said of the latter.

Another potential story killer is what O’Leary calls “death by a thousand choices,” where the reader can choose to navigate through a multimedia package by clicking on different images without any guidance on where they should go next. “Anytime you’re giving people the option to click on [different multimedia elements] you’re telling them it’s not totally essential,” she said. “When you don’t interweave in a tighter way, multimedia becomes a distraction.” Digressions can add interesting layers to a story, but interrupts distract the reader.

Cheap tricks: For O’Leary, infographics, listicles and headlines that pose a question or use a superlative often fall into the category of cheap tricks that can be very effective—or fall flat—depending on their execution. By appealing to the “lizard brain,” sites like Buzzfeed attract thousands of clicks from listicles that “you probably clicked on even if you didn’t want to,” she said.

A better appeal, she continued, is to the curious brain where the writer builds a narrative question into the front of the piece to pique the reader’s interest. Of Slate’s top 10 stories of 2012, four of them used a headline in the form of a question. Content mills also use the question format to generate traffic, so it’s important that the article actually answers the question instead of filling the reader with empty hope and, ultimately, frustration. The current craze for infographics, animated GIFs and graphic narrative (O’Leary mentioned Symboliamag.com as a cool example of drawing readers into a story) appear to the visual brain, but not all infographics are well executed, especially if they lack a clear narrative. “You can find infographic hell on Pinterest,” quipped O’Leary.

Genius moves: The single factor that all mind-blowing multimedia work shares is the element of surprise. “The beautiful thing about surprise is it can happen on so many levels,” said O’Leary. Stories can use unique visuals or format to surprise and delight readers. O’Leary pointed to “Glitter in the Dark,” a Pitchfork profile on Bat for Lashes’ Natasha Khan. Two New York Times digital stories from 2012 also fit this category: “Just One More Game …” a piece about the addictiveness of gaming that used an interactive visual to mimic its subject and “Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek,” a multimedia piece that incorporated video, flyover graphical illustrations, slideshows and a written account of the avalanche.

“Snow Fall” was heralded in many journalism circles as a major achievement of online storytelling, but O’Leary revealed that some of the reporters who worked on Snow Fall felt the multimedia could have been even more tightly integrated into the narrative. Two more examples, Whitney Jone’s “First Love and 27 Other Firsts” and “Alma,” a web documentary about a Guatemalan woman in a gang, sparked debate among attendees over the fine line between gimmick and genius. “The best stuff is always when people haven’t seen it before,” said O’Leary. “Our new CEO says ‘The next Snow Fall will look nothing like Snow Fall.’”