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What’s Next for News?and provided a summary under eachtopic with links to related content. Ourlast approach presented the informationas a simplified blurb—serving asa headline for this topic—with a set oflinks, in reverse chronological order,to the news organization’s storiesabout ethanol.To test the various digital-storyformats, we recruited 197 people whoranged in age from their teens to theirlate 70s. Slightly more than half werewomen. The participants, randomlyassigned to one of the five formats,spent as much time as they likedwith the material before filling out asurvey. We wanted to determine theirinterest in the topic, their knowledgeabout it, and their engagement withand opinions about the story formatthey saw.What Worked?With the measuring tools we used toassess their responses, we arrived atsome conclusions about what workedand what didn’t work with each ofthese five formats:Simulation Game: This version rankedthe lowest on virtually all of our measures.From participants’ comments itwas clear that when people seek newsthey want to acquire the informationquickly and easily. While this kind ofsimulation game is effective in teachingand training, it did not appear tobe a viable way to present informationfor a casual news audience.Board Game: The board game testedwell as far as the amount of informationread and whether or not theexperience was fun. Based on thefeedback we received, the board/quizstyle game seemed to be an effectiveand engaging way to present an arrayPlaying the News Moves Into the ClassroomWhat we learned in our Knight NewsChallenge grant project Playing theNews informs the way we teachour journalism students. Whileincorporating Web story design andstructure into reporting and writingclasses is imperative, it isn’t enoughto simply translate story content intoformats that allow for interactivity.We need to enlist student journalistsin inventing digital story forms thattake full advantage of the Web inways that provide the context thatpeople want.To do this, build in at leastone assignment in which studentscreate a topic-organized page ofcontent to guide readers throughthe complexities of an issue orcoverage of an ongoing controversy.This exercise helps students developvaluable synthesizing skills as theycreate topic categories that will shedlight on the major points or themesthat connect stories across time.This requires higher-order thinkingthat instructors shouldn’t assumestudents already have. The abilityto take a bird’s-eye view of multiplestories over a period of time andfind a way to make sense of themis crucial—and challenging.Think, too, about asking studentsto brainstorm about story-focusedgames designed for a news Web site.This will tap into the experiencesof these digital natives who havea much more tenuous connectionto news stories told in traditionalways. Many of our Playing the Newsparticipants were attracted to theboard-style game as a way of connectingto news so this format mightbe worth pursuing to convey certaintypes of information.There could be no one better tocreate and test such news gamesthan those whose peers are part ofthe audience that news organizationswant to attract. At the University ofMinnesota School of Journalism andMass Communication, we teach acourse called Convergence Journalism.Our students use contemporarydigital tools to learn about andexperiment with various news storyforms and storytelling strategies.In the content analysis exercise,students are assigned readings andrequired to complete a contentanalysis of news to demonstrate theirunderstanding of the topic of theweek. To complete this assignmentstudents organize news content ina coherent way and create categoriesthat accurately and effectivelydescribe the threads of news reporting.The obvious next step is forstudents to create a topic-organizedWeb page that could guide peoplethrough content that has appearedover time in coverage of a topic inthe news.Even in our school’s basic reportingand writing classes, students learnthe strengths and weaknesses oftelling stories using different formsand with various tools. When theypitch a story idea, they are askedto describe the form they think willwork best to tell the story. A blog?Slideshow? A Google map? What islikely to be the best way to guidereaders into and through a storyand engage them with its content?Perhaps traditional text will workbest. Or a combination of formsmight be tried with various storyelements presented in different ways.As storytelling forms evolve, wewant journalism students to be onthe front lines of experimentation.Yet we also want them to know thevalue of gathering information aboutwhat works as they evaluate theiroptions. —N.P. and K.A.H.56 Nieman Reports | Summer 2010