Correspondent from the Future: Future & Digital Storytelling
Baratunde Thurston
The Onion
Webvisions 2012, wvpdx
- @jjpolitics
- jack and jill politics
- “the watermelon has long symbolized intelligence discourse”
- tv host discovery channel “future of”
- director of digital at @theonion
- live hate-tweeting: all twilight movies
- Author of How To Be Black
- if you don’t buy this book, you’re a racist
- Use brainstorm for headline about steve jobs death
- For live-tweeting events, have prep documents with many dozens of tweets prepared.
- for oscars: search onion archive and retweet.
- using analytics to see what got retweeted, and then used that information to decide what to published on the website.
- Be a Platform
- Did planned parenthood satire story about “abortionplex”
- Didn’t ask anyone to do anything, but…
- Someone created Yelp destination for it
- Received 282 reviews, quite detailed.
- Supports and extended the world/story.
- Invite people to participate
- “If you sight a 500 foot tall Bin Laden, send pictures.”
- Evolve Story Across Platforms
- Created entire campaign around mayorship on foursquare
- Video
- In person campaign
- In these divisive times, we need something to bring people together. That’s whiskey. Hence, “Whiskey Fridays”.
- #HowBlackAreYou
- Started as a dialogue on twitter
- Turned into an idea for a book
- Interviewed people on video (using iPhone 4s)
- Invited people to respond on their website and tell their own story
- The book had dozens of questions around identity.
- “When did you learn you were black?” … “a white ghost?”
- Did a live-writing idea:
- while writing certain chapters:
- shared screen using join.me
- shared links on google+ and twitter
- posted rules on the left:
- chat amongst yourself, not with me
- don’t request control, etc.
- “How self obsessed does one have to be to set something like this up?”
- “I have an urge to tweet about this”
- “Based on what I read here, I am going to buy this book.”
- “it is interesting to see his writing flow”
- Stories Are Worlds
- we ask people to suspend disbelief and join us in that world
- the platforms are just different access points into that world
- check out http://cultivatedwit.com