In between chapters of summer reading (currently Oryx and Crake by Twitter extraordinaire Margaret Atwood), I’m putting together the web building/online journalism training for the ILPC Summer Workshop at UT this weekend.

Whenever there’s time to lose myself in good storytelling like Atwood’s, I get to thinking of the workshop of all workshops I attended a couple of years back on multiplatform journalism at the Poynter Institute. We started the high-tech training with a focus not on the latest web technology or multimedia fad in newsrooms, but on our favorite storytellers, a process led by Chip Scanlan.

At the time, numbed by deadlines and the day-to-day grind of daily deadline writing of articles — not stories — it took me a while to remember the last time I was truly engaged with a piece of journalism. Finally I did come up with one, a Texas journalist who engages me with his stories more than any other: Skip Hollandsworth. I still think about this story and re-read it with students from time to time.

What makes a good story?

Many things, but at its core, I believe a good story needs to be relevant to our lives and the world around us. It should tell the story of a human experience that anyone can relate to through emotion, need or drive. And a good story gives me a reason to read to the end. How many times do we pick up a book or magazine or click on a link, only to be disengaged within a few paragraphs, pages or chapters?

The inverted pyramid is great for web updates, to find out the latest and most important facts by skimming, but it defeats the entire purpose of storytelling by guaranteeing the audience that the information they are getting will only get less important if they continue reading. But a good story keeps the audience around, whether through means of suspense, the sheer importance and draw of the information provided or because it’s just a good ride.

So what does this have to do with online journalism? Everything. What I took away from that training, and what I hope to impart to my students is that storytelling is just as important with a flip cam or audio recorder as it is with words. An online interactive package should still at its essence include good storytelling. The technology is just the means to the end, not the end itself. So we can teach students to edit video, put together slideshows or an interactive graphic, but they need to embrace that they are storytellers above all.