1. STORIES FOR A BETTER WORLD.
2. I arrived at Upworthy in February 2015 and since then, a lot of people have been asking what we’re up to. We’ve made a lot of changes already and I’m proud of how far we’ve come together as a team in just a short time.
3. UPWORTHY SPRUNG TO LIFE BY BRINGING MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF ATTENTION TO STORIES THAT REALLY MATTER. 18 million people saw Zach Wahls’ passionate defense of his mothers’ relationship (“Two lesbians raised a baby and this is what they got”) and helped move the debate on marriage equality forward.
4. And it worked. Upworthy was crazy successful, the fastest growing media company of all time.
5. AND THEN (LIKE IN ANY GOOD STORY) SOMETHING CHANGED.
6. BUT FIRST, A WORD.
7. “CLICKBAIT”
8. Oof. A lot of people think of Upworthy and think: “Ugh. I hate those annoying ‘clickbait’ headlines.” Yeah, we know. We don’t like them either.
9. “WE SORT OF UNLEASHED A MONSTER. SORRY FOR THAT. SORRY WE KIND OF BROKE THE INTERNET LAST YEAR. I'M EXCITED GOING FORWARD TO SAY GOODBYE TO CLICKBAIT." — PETER KOECHLEY, UPWORTHY CO-FOUNDER AT THE GUARDIAN’S CHANGING MEDIA SUMMIT, MARCH 2015 SO, WE APOLOGIZED.
10. BUT IT’S NOT THE BIGGEST CHANGE WE’RE MAKING.
11. WE ARE MOVING FROM CURATION TO STORY CREATION
12. WE ARE DEPLOYING SERIOUSLY DEEP DATA TO SUPPORT STORYTELLING IN BRAND NEW WAYS.
13. AND WE ARE BUILDING A WHOLE NEW WORLD OF UPWORTHY STORYTELLING
14. Storytelling? Wait, that’s not a hot, new distribution model. Where are the “newsonomics”? Where are the future- o f - m e d i a b u z z w o r d s ? W h a t o f “platlishing”? You know, this world:
15. (What’s so crazy-exciting about being at Upworthy right now is that we get to work on this question — and do it in the service of stories that actually matter.)
16. WHAT WILL YOU BE DOING THAT’S UNIQUE?
17. EMPATHETIC STORYTELLING THERE ARE SO MANY THINGS THAT WE KNOW ABOUT CHARACTER EMOTION SURPRISE MEANINGSTRUCTURE Story nerds dig this stuff. We understand the toolkit to build a story that you absolutely can’t put down.
18. AUDIENCE MEDIUM ACTIONSFRAMING HABITS Every day Upworthy is learning more about human actions surrounding digital stories and how stories travel in digital space. THE DATA BEHIND STORIES WE’RE ALSO LEARNING GROUNDBREAKING NEW THINGS ABOUT
19. EMPATHETIC STORYTELLING DEEP DATA BUT HERE’S MY PROBLEM: THESE TWO DISCIPLINES ARE USUALLY KEPT FAR APART.
20. WE ARE ASKING: WHAT IF THEY MET? SO AT EMPATHETIC STORYTELLING DEEP DATA
21. EMOTIONS HABITS WHAT RELATIONSHIPS WOULD WE FIND? “How do particular emotions stir habit formation?”
22. ACTIONS MEANING WHAT INTERACTIONS WOULD WE DISCOVER? “What actions lead people to find deeper meaning in a story?”
23. STRUCTURE MEDIUM WHAT ASSOCIATIONS WOULD BE REVEALED? “What structures improve a story’s resonance on each platform?”
24. WE BELIEVE THAT BURIED INSIDE THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN STORIES AND DATA, THERE IS THE POWER TO CHANGE THE WORLD.
25. AND THAT’S WHAT WE’RE UP TO.
26. IT’S A BIG SHIFT. WE’RE IN THE MIDDLE OF IT. AND WE ALREADY HAVE SOME INITIAL EXPERIMENTS UNDERWAY.
27. FRAMING Mason Wartman abandoned a life on Wall Street to start a pizza shop in Philadelphia, where customers can get a slice but also pay an extra dollar to buy a Post-it note and put it on the wall.
28. 2 MILLION PEOPLE READING ABOUT WORKERS’ WAGES AUDIENCE MEDIUM Upworthy does longform?
29. Getting a story to more people than the entire population of Canada? Yeah, Upworthy still does that, too.
30. QUALITY EMPATHETIC STORYTELLING FUTURE-OF-NEWS TYPES AND DIGITAL MEDIA THINKERS WILL PROBABLY SHRUG. 31. Early 2014 Today Can you measure a good story by the numbers? If you’d asked me a couple of years, ago, I would have said, “hell no.”
32. And we’re big. With 20 million monthly readers, Upworthy’s audience is larger than the populations of Chile, New York or Florida — or five years of attendance at Yankee Stadium.
33. HOW IS “STORYTELLING” A STRATEGY, EXACTLY?
34. The media industry is an exciting and volatile one right now.
35. MISSION-DRIVEN DATA-INFORMED STORYTELLING We believe that high-quality, mission-driven, data-informed storytelling that works with platforms, not against them, is a truly exciting and defensible new frontier.
36. Upworthy has always had what we’ve called, “the Little Mermaid strategy.”
37. WE ARE IN A STREET FIGHT FOR HUMAN ATTENTION.
38. AND IS GOING TO FIGHT ON THE SIDE OF THE STORIES THAT MATTER MOST.
39. And I’m proud to be leading that fight.
slideshare.net/UpworthyAdmin/july-8-2015-upworthy-editorial-vision
https://youtu.be/kBpfDRpTPFc