Merchandising, merchandising…where the real money from the movie is made! Spaceballs-the T-shirt, Spaceballs-the Coloring Book, Spaceballs-the Lunch box, Spaceballs-the Breakfast Cereal, Spaceballs-the Flame Thrower. [turns it on] The Kids love this one! [Yogurt in Spaceballs, 1987]

In Part I and Part II of this series, we used the expression “immersive journalism” to identify journalism that employs virtual and augmented reality to add a (literal) layer of depth to its storytelling. After all, as a quick search on Google or its dedicated Wikipedia entry will confirm, this is how the expression is usually intended.

However, I will here argue that this is a limited understanding of what immersive journalism is (or could be) about. In the realm of fiction, where the notion of immersive storytelling is well-established, bulky VR headsets and fancy AR apps have so far failed to meet their pumped up expectations as revolutionary storytelling tools. Indeed, the main driving force behind contemporary storytelling’s immersive turn is world-building — less a tool or a technology than a narrative logic.

What fictional juggernauts such as Star Wars, the Marvel superheroes, and Game of Thrones have in common is that they are first and foremost fictional universes; they are worlds that can be explored rather than linear stories with a beginning and an end. Their endless plots and subplots tell the stories of dozens of characters rather than of a handful of archetypal characters.

So, yes, what I’m doing here is trying to imagine how the notion of world-building could expand what we mean by the expression “immersive journalism” and whether it could indicate a possible business model for journalism. I’m doing it in three steps.

• First off, I’ll further analyze the notion of immersive storytelling starting from Janet Murray’s book Hamlet on the Holodeck (sort of the Old Testament for immersive storytelling). In particular, I’ll explore the notion of world-building.
• Secondly, I’ll try to imagine how this concept of world-building might be applied to the field of journalism, both at a narrative and at a financial level.
• And finally, I’ll focus on a specific case study. I’ll explore the quasi-fictional universe of a media outlet that over the past few years brilliantly applied the core principles of world-building, Alex Jones’ conspiracy-fuelled website Infowars.

This latter example and my general tendency to compare journalism with fiction might be frowned upon and considered a vaguely post-modern attempt to deny that journalism can unveil the truth or at least true things about reality. But it’s quite the opposite; I firmly believe that journalism should be an earnest, truth-seeking effort. However, I content that storytelling is a big component of journalism and that therefore there are more similarities between journalism and fiction than we might believe.

As for Alex Jones, I just think that some of the tactics that made him rich and famous (only top-down bans could stop him) could be re-appropriated for different, progressive, and truth-seeking aims.

The emergence of immersive storytelling

As I mentioned in the first article of this series, in 1997 American professor Janet Murray published the book Hamlet on the Holodeck, where she investigated how computers revolutionized storytelling.

In a nutshell, the author argued that every digital story enjoys four properties: it’s procedural, participatory, encyclopedic, and spatial. The only adjective that probably requires some additional explanation is “procedural”; with it, professor Murray means that every digital story is potentially “made of executable procedures”.

To my understanding, it seems that the two adjectives that truly lived up to the test of time are “spatial” and “encyclopedic”. If I think about today’s most successful stories, such as the superhero, sci-fi, and fantasy tales that I mentioned above, they are certainly “spatial” and “encyclopedic”.

What’s more literally spatial than Star Wars’ space universe with its impressively detailed fictional geography of the Galaxy? Or more encyclopedic than Game of Thrones’ intricate story-arcs?

As for the participatory and procedural characters of today’s mainstream stories, it seems to me that they’re expressed less as an interaction with the plot than as the possibility to freely explore the fictional world of the story, just think of recent hits in open-world video games like Spider-man and Red Dead Redemption.

In other words, the participatory affordances of the story are mainly a subset of its “spatiality”.

In this conception, the most fundamental characteristic of immersive storytelling is that stories become worlds. In his book Convergence Culture (one of the New Testaments of immersive storytelling), media scholar Henry Jenkins reports what an experienced screenwriter told him:

When I first started, you would pitch a story because, without a good story, you didn’t really have a film. Later, once sequels started to take off, you pitched a character because a character could support multiple stories. And now, you pitch a world because a world can support multiple characters and multiple stories across multiple media.

So, the logic of contemporary storytelling is world-building, and while you can certainly build a fictional world in augmented or virtual reality, you can also do without. All you need is a strong concept for a cohesive narrative universe that can spread across multiple media, just think of Marvel’s cinematic universe stories that live across films and TV series.

But this article isn’t about the incredible tales of colorful superheroes. It’s about journalism and real-life stories.

Immersive journalism and world-building

World-building is a big component of contemporary immersive storytelling but how can we apply world-building to immersive journalism?

After all, journalism deals in facts, a different currency than the one traded in the realm of fiction. But journalism is also about identity and a sense of belonging. As media scholar Hossein Derakhshan pointed out in a recent article on Medium, digital subscriptions to The New York Times spiked after Trump’s election, not just because people wanted to pay for quality reporting but also because they wanted to feel part of a resistance — the membership as a badge of support for a worldview.

It’s in this sense that I here consider journalism as a matter of world-building. Reading a reportage on our favorite media outlet or watching a political talk show on our go-to TV channel is a way to use facts to build and confirm our view of the world.

The research question that started this series of article is whether immersive journalism can represent a viable business model for the news industry. If we consider fictional storytelling, we quickly realize that what’s truly successful, also commercially, is world-building.

As master Yogurt says in the Star Wars parody Space Balls, merchandising is “where the real money from the movie is made!” And merchandising — toys, action figures, costumes, clothes, food, and so on — is a potentially unlimited resource in the ever-expanding fictional universe of a franchise like Star Wars.

Henry Jenkins calls it the “extractability principle of transmedia storytelling” and defines it as the moment “when the fan takes aspects of the story away with them as resources they deploy in the spaces of everyday life (e.g. items from the gift shop).”

Can the extractability principle become a sustainable business model for immersive journalism? In other words, can selling merchandise represent a potential source of income for a newsroom? Will journalists be in the business of selling t-shirts to their fans?

These are the questions that I’ll address in the next section.

In a galaxy far right away

You might well say that I picked the wrongest example possible. With all the journalists and media outlets that I could have referred to, I decided to pick the conspiracy theorist par excellence, Alex Jones.

Jones doesn’t even claim to be a journalist anymore. In June 2017, during a trial, his lawyers styled him as a “performance artist” active in the entertainment business. Elsewhere, I described his “news” as fiction-based and claimed that it doesn’t make sense to debunk them because it would be akin to fact-checking the physics of a superhero movie. You don’t fact-check fiction.

So what can journalism learn from such an outlandish liar? Not much, but the business model behind Infowars is worth a look.

As you might know, Infowars doesn’t make money thanks to usual sources of revenue in journalism like subscriptions or ads. Jones makes a living selling stuff on the Infowars online store. And I don’t mean just t-shirts or caps for white chaps with a dubious sense of fashion. The Infowars store sells everything you might need in an imaginary world where the conspiracy theories peddled by Jones were true.

Thus, you can buy survival gears, water purification systems (the government is poisoning the water to turn citizens gay), gun “tactical” holsters, and the most lucrative product of the catalog: nutritional supplements. Jones built a snake-oil empire selling them.

The Infowars store sells the fantasy world imagined by Jones to his fans. Purchasing a 10-pack of strawberry-flavored “Caveman True Paleo Formula” — a mix of cartilage, bone broth, and “paleo ingredients” — the Infowars follower reinforces his identity as conspiracy theorist and his sense of belonging to the world of the story. It’s the extractability principle at its finest.

At the tail end of 2017, Harvard University’s Nieman Journalism Lab asked “some of the smartest people in journalism and digital media” to make predictions about journalism in 2018. Jamie Mottram, Gannet’s former senior director of social content, predicted that “most media brands will start selling merchandise.”

We’re now at the tail end of 2018, but I’m not aware of any particularly successful efforts in this direction. Nevertheless, I still think that merchandise can represent a valuable asset for journalism, a way to lure the reader into the world of the story and to let them spread the message on behalf of the media outlet.

If you want to continue the conversation or signal a media outlet that is betting heavily on its merchandise, please drop a line at davide.banis@gmail.com

Is Immersive Content the Future of Journalism? (Part III) was originally published in Submarine Channel on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Going to the cinema can be a powerful experience. It summons us to a specific place at a specific time. We make a trip out of it often with friends or family, so it’s a shared experience. For all those reasons, we’re very receptive to the story told there and then. Nothing exists outside of that theater for a couple of hours.

Immersion in cinema is strong and we can’t really duplicate this specific experience anywhere else. Not even in front of a TV and especially not on our computers and mobile devices. Immersion in VR is an entirely different experience altogether. Our digital devices are not designed to isolate us for a couple of hours. In that timeframe, most smartphones will have notified us of something ten times or more… And maybe this is the key to storytelling in the digital age: embracing the pervasive nature of new technologies and adopting a different pace in storytelling. Hence this selection of five real-time narrative works.

By Benjamin Hoguet

This article is part of Submarine Channel’s Top 5 series.

Top 5 Real-time Narratives: Lifeline

A commercial and critical success, Lifeline is a trend-setter. This mobile game tells the interactive story of Taylor, an astronaut stranded on a distant planet. He manages to establish a communication channel with you (lucky!) and he asks you for advice. Your role is to guide him, to make the right choices for him and help him survive.

Lifeline would be a «simple» branching narrative if it weren’t for the real-time aspect of the game: if Taylor needs to walk one hour to some location, nothing will happen in-game during that time. His action becomes your waiting. Then, suddenly, a new message from Taylor sets off a notification on your phone and the game resumes. Depending on your play style, Lifeline will be part of your daily routine for a couple of days or more.

No more ellipsis, time becomes the core element of the story and your emotional reaction is directly tied to how time passes.

Top 5 Real-time Narratives: Bury Me, My Love

In many ways, Bury Me, My Love is a direct descendant of Lifeline. You interact with the main character through text messages that you receive in real-time on your mobile, etc. But in Lifeline, texting was a bit of an « excuse » to tell the story. There is not much of a connection between using a phone and surviving on planet! It’s a convention and it works fine for that story.

‘Bury Me, My Love’ goes a bit further as it tells the story of Nour, a Syrian woman trying to reach Europe and texting with Madj (you), her husband. In any migration nowadays, a phone is the number one tool for survival!

Consequently, this real-time mobile narrative becomes that much more powerful. Waiting for Nour to wake up or to cross a mine field and tell you she’s okay becomes a moment of sincere anxiety before the next notification sets you free… ‘Bury Me, My Love’ puts you in a state of mind very similar to that of millions of family members that stayed behind in Syria while a loved one went on the perilous road to Europe.

Top 5 Real-time Narratives: #PLS

#PLS is a live-action series for Snapchat, and for Snapchat only. It tells the story of a group of friends about to start their first year in university in Belgium. During 40 days in late 2017, 160 minutes have been shot and broadcast as Snapchat stories. Each day, between three and five stories were published, scoring 16 millions views in total.

A key factor of success for such a show is the (perceived) real-time narrative. It’s really important for the audience to believe that the character’s timeline is synced with their own. Interestingly, the few times when stories were published at an incorrect time (let’s say, a night shot at 2 pm), the backlash was immediate because this is not the deal on Snapchat. It is, after all, the iconic ephemeral social network…

Top 5 Real-time Narratives: The Infiltrator

The Infiltrator is the first installment of an upcoming series of real-time interactive fictions, entitled Phone Stories. Your role is to interact with an insider, embedded within the French far-right party during the latest presidential elections in 2017.

Once again, Lifeline is a direct inspiration for this piece but there is a twist: the story is not only delivered in real-time, it is also written in real-time! Author David Dufresne (Prison Valley, Fort McMoney) teamed up again with Akufen, a Canadian studio, to create this innovative interactive storytelling tool. A tool they hope the use for other stories. Stories that need to be told live.

Top 5 Real-time Narratives: Alice, the Virtual Reality Play

Real-time storytelling is a natural fit for mobile and social experiences, this seems clear. However, pieces like Alice, the Virtual Reality Play make the best out of its immersive potential in a very different way.

Alice is a virtual installation inspired by the work of Lewis Caroll, in which your VR headset enables you to wander and interact with a crazy environment. But that’s not all. Soon a rabbit appears. He seems virtual… but when he reacts to what you just said or when you feel him touching your arm, you realize that it is actually portrayed by an actor, motion captured in real-time!

Everything becomes more intense, you don’t get that weird feeling like when you’re talking to an extremely clumsy artificial intelligence-controlled character. Interaction becomes discussion and the story instantly becomes more immersive and impactful.Going to the cinema can be a powerful experience. It summons us to a specific place at a specific time. We make a trip out of it often with friends or family, so it’s a shared experience. For all those reasons, we’re very receptive to the story told there and then. Nothing exists outside of that theater for a couple of hours.

By Benjamin Hoguet

Benjamin Hoguet is a writer, interactive designer and speaker who focuses on the intersection between interaction and storytelling. He has written several books (in French) on subjects such as VR, transmedia, and the narrative power of interfaces. Hoguet also writes a biweekly newsletter about new forms of storytelling, ‘Nouvelles Narrations,’ which is treasure trove of inspiration. Follow him on Twitter @benhoguet.

More Top 5 articles on Submarine Channel.

Top 5: Amazing stories told in real time was originally published in Submarine Channel on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Waiting for the Singularity, I selected five great books (as far as I know, written by human beings) that tackle “storytelling” from as many different perspectives as possible. Together, this collection should give you a fair account of a practice that is a big part of what defines us as humans. And perhaps reading these will make you a better storyteller.

The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler

(2007; p.407)

The quote: I realized that the good stories were affecting the organs of my body in various ways, and the really good ones were stimulating more than one organ. An effective story grabs your gut, tightens your throat, makes your heart race and your lungs pump, brings tears to your eyes or an explosion of laughter to your lips.

I’ll start with the most difficult item in this Top 5: Mr. Vogler’s monumental The Writer’s Journey. I have a love/hate relationship with this tome that is an accepted industry-standard for Hollywood creatives. On the one hand, it’s full of wondrous insights and, most importantly, it taps with clarity into some central, practical issues for storytellers. On the other, it’s the embodiment of a, so to speak, anal-retentive approach to storytelling that sacrifices creativity for the sake of well-oiled structures.

Building on Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Vogler claims that all successful stories’ plots boil down to a handful of mythical structures and character archetypes. In almost every good story, there’s a hero that goes on an adventure to fix the world assisted by a mentor. You’re all probably familiar with this theory but it’s impressive to see how Vogler applies it to all your favorite movies.

Hamlet on the Holodeck by Janet Murray

(1998; p.336)

The quote: The most ambitious promise of the new narrative medium is its potential for telling stories about whole systems.

If I have mixed feelings for Vogler, I have nothing but unconditional love for Janet Murray and her Hamlet on the Holodeck (hence, HoH), especially since I interviewed her for Submarine Channel back in September 2017.

HoH is nothing short of a media bible that laid the foundations for plenty of scholarly studies in the field of interactive storytelling. In particular, chapter III has been widely discussed. There, Janet Murray proposes that every “digital environment” enjoys four properties: it’s procedural, participatory, spatial, and encyclopedic.

Without indulging too much in the theory, the key point that Janet Murray understood already in the 1990s is that the main characteristic of stories in the digital age is that they are first and foremost “environments”, namely fictional worlds that fans can explore. Just think of the proliferation of world-building sagas like Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Game of Thrones. Concretely, this means that storytellers need to equip their readers and viewers with maps so they don’t get lost in the fictional universes. Also BBC filmmaker Adam Curtis emphasized the importance of maps for contemporary storytelling in another interview that we published in October.

An updated edition of HoH was recently published. Janet Murray said that she was tempted to make the new preface three words long: “I was right!”

The Art of Immersion by Frank Rose

(2011; p. 384)

The quote: People have always wanted to in some way inhabit the stories that move them. The only real variable is whether technology gives them that opportunity.

If HoH is the Old Testament of interactive storytelling, The Art of Immersion by Frank Rose is the New Testament. In this book, the former Wired journalist recounts the transformations that occurred in storytelling in the period of time that spans roughly from the first Matrix movie (1999) to Christopher Nolan’s Batman movie The Dark Knight (2008). Relying on a wealth of interviews with writers, studio executives, and producers, The Art of Immersion explores how business and narrative are becoming increasingly interwoven in immersive storytelling.

In this decade, the processes that Janet Murray described in HoH just accelerated. Stories left the bi-dimensional worlds of the screen and of the page to invade our real lives in the forms of ARGs, cosplay, and merchandise. As master Yogurt — a parody of Star Wars’ Yoda — says in a memorable scene of Mel Brooks’ Spaceballs: “Merchandising… where the real money from the movie is made!”

The Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall

(2012; p. 272)

The quote: Fiction writers are fully ten times more likely to be bipolar than the general population.

Why do we spend so much time in the fictional universes described by Murray and Rose? How come it is socially acceptable for adult specimens of Homo Sapiens to engage so deeply with things that don’t even exist? American scholar Jonathan Gottschall addresses these questions in his pop-science book The Storytelling Animal. Drawing from neuroscience, psychology, and evolutionary biology, Gottschall proposes that stories help us deal with complex real-life situations, just like pilots use flight simulators during their training. In this sense, fiction has an evolutionary value.

The Storytelling Animal is a comprehensive read with examples that run the gamut from bedtime tales to Hitler’s speeches (if you’re using the latter as the former, you’re doing it wrong). Gottschall is a lively writer and soon you’ll want more of his anti-postmodern literature theory. Not strictly about storytelling but his next book The Professor in the Cage (“a Fight Club for English professors”) also makes for a great read.

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King

(2000; p. 291)

The quote: The road to hell is paved with adverbs.

Eminent storytelling experts wrote the books that we have so far discussed. However, none of them is a storyteller first and foremost. If it’s true that sometimes a more theoretical approach can grant more lucid insights into any field of knowledge, it’s equally true that there are peculiarities that only a hands-on expertise can bring to the fore.

Stephen King’s On Writing is in this sense a unique resource for writers of all sorts. The book is at the same time a memoir, a toolbox, and a treasure trove of advice.

In the first part, the author of IT, The Shining, and Misery recounts his life from his early attempts at “the craft” to the time he created — often under the influence of drugs — his hallmark masterpieces.

The second half of the book is a practical guide to master the art of writing. No need to take drugs. At the opposite, King reels off a series of rather sober rules.

Orson Welles — another great storyteller — supposedly said that “the enemy of art is the absence of limitations.” This is an additional piece of advice that it’s good for storytellers. Maybe that’s why Submarine Channel’s Top 5’s are so good. They force you to limit your choices and stick just to the best.

However, there are many more storytelling books that would be worthy of a mention beyond the 5 featured here. For example, I’m now reading Trust Me, I’m Lying by media manipulator Ryan Holiday. It’s not about writing but about the way media create stories out of thin air. Do you know any other must-read for storytellers? Drop me a line at davide.banis@gmail.com.

It’s almost spring and while others start getting fit for swimsuit season, I start compiling my summer beach reading list.

5 books to not completely fail as storyteller was originally published in Submarine Channel on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The New York Times hit the threshold of 308k new digital subscribers, The Guardian topped 500k paying readers, and the Financial Times relies now on more than 700k paying subscribers. Numbers aside, Western public opinion has been persistently debating issues ascribable to the vague notion of “fake news”: trust, post-truth politics, fact-checking, accountability, reliability have all been key-words of the past 365 years. Few other times in history featured such a marked obsession for journalism.

“Digital media juggernauts that have been regarded as successful business ventures with remarkable potential suddenly revealed to be anything but cash cows.”

At the same time, the end of the year has been constellated by a series of signs that –according to many- presaged an imminent media apocalypse. Vice fell short of its € 800 M revenue target. Buzzfeed missed it by 20%, pushing away the rumored hypothesis of an IPO in 2018. Mashable –valued at € 250 M in March 2016 — has been sold to trade publisher Ziff Davis at the fire-sale price of € 50 M.

In other words, digital media juggernauts that have been regarded as successful business ventures with remarkable potential until then suddenly revealed to be anything but cash cows.

The massive injections of money that these companies received from venture capitalists are likely not to turn into profits anytime soon. Observers quickly identified dwindling digital advertising revenues as the main culprit of this carnage. Facebook and Google –the two undisputed digital behemoths of advertising- simply don’t leave any piece of the cake to publishers, cashing in the 60% of all ad dollars.

What to make of this apparently contradictory tendencies? Well, in a nutshell, it seems that journalism’ societal relevance has never been higher, yet the field lacks viable business models.

“Facebook and Google –the two undisputed digital behemoths of advertising– simply don’t leave any piece of the cake to publishers.”

Paid subscriptions are growing but this cannot be enough to financially sustain the ever-increasing plethora of media outlets. At the end, we are fine with paying Netflix and Spotify because we know that there we can find almost all notable TV, cinema, and music content. The hypothesis of an equivalent uber-publisher for journalism appears remote, given the characteristics of the business.

Should we then just resign to the hypothesis of doomsday for journalism? Not so easily. There are still several monetization roads that are worth to be explored. To take the first one, we have to go neither left nor right but start digging because it’s a road that goes in deep. It’s the road of immersion.

The art of immersion as the future of journalism

The possibility that we want to discuss in this series of articles is whether immersive storytelling can become an important asset for news organizations, not just at the level of content (it seems that there are no doubts about it) but especially at the level of economic sustainability.
With the expression “immersive storytelling”, we group an array of forms like virtual and augmented realities, interactive stories and maps, and even videogames, ARG (Alternate-Realities Games) and LARP (Live-Action Role Playing). Moreover, we include in the category stories that recur massively to techniques and strategies of world-building, like Game of Thrones. There are many more trends that we could include but that would go beyond the scope of this series. Here, you can find an impressively complete list of them.

Many books have been written on the topic of immersive storytelling (and one day we might select the best of them for one of our Submarine Channel’s TOP5s) but if we had to indicate just two -the Holy Scriptures of the genre- we’d probably say Hamlet on the Holodeck by Janet Murray and The Art of Immersion by Frank Rose.

The former -the Old Testament of immersive storytelling- is a 1997 book that investigates how storytelling has been revolutionized by the advent of computers. According to the author –a bubbly American professor we interviewed in September– every digital story enjoys four properties: it’s procedural, participatory, encyclopedic, and spatial. Maybe a bit surprisingly, these four properties will be fundamental also in our exploration of immersive content for journalism.

Instead, The Art of Immersion by Frank Rose -the New Testament- is a 2011 account of the shift occurred in storytelling from flat to immersive. The author -a journalist and digital anthropologist- spent years interviewing writers, producers, businessmen, and other key figures that played a preeminent role in creating immersive stories. Frank Rose lively describes how pervasive narratives took hold in Hollywood and Madison Avenue alike. This series of articles explores the possibility that immersion will take hold also in the newsrooms of the future.

Submarine Channel — Waterproof Projects That Navigate In Depth

We at Submarine Channel have always been busy with immersive storytelling. Our very name hints at the art of plumbing the depths of non-flat stories. If there’s a new technology in town, it’s just a matter of time before we try to use it to tell a story in a non-conventional way. VR films, i-docs, games, animated shorts, and interactive graphic novels form just a partial list of the boundaries we tried to push.

Often, our projects deal with issues related to journalism and media at large. It’s almost a distinctive thread that runs through several Submarine Channel’s productions. In each part of this series on immersive content and journalism, we’re going to explore in detail one of these projects — showing how they complement our overall discussion. Today, it’s the turn of Unspeak!

A 2013 interactive documentary, Unspeak is based on a book of the same name by journalist Steven Poole. It investigates the manipulative power of language in between media and politics, analyzing the empty expressions (“weapons of mass destructions”, “austerity measures”, “war on terror”,…) that the 24-hour news cycle spin continuously.

A hybrid made of data visualization, short films, and a participatory dictionary, Unspeak exposed the vacuity of our contemporary media diets with an Adam-Curtis-esque feel to it. The time of “fake news” –equally empty expression- was yet to come but Unspeak was able to identify some of the crucial challenges that journalism had to face.

Five years later (yes, a 2013 project is already 5 years old), our news environments are more polluted than ever. Unspeak-like language is everywhere. Empty expressions just multiplied.

Could immersive content be an answer to this situation? This is what we’ll try to understand in the next articles of this series.

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Journalism has never been more relevant, yet the field lacks sustainable business models. This article is the first installment of our new content series that investigates whether immersive content (virtual and augmented Realities, world-building,…) could constitute a viable business model for the future of journalism.

Is immersive content the future of journalism? was originally published in Submarine Channel on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.