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In the last few days I’ve consumed the following kinds of stories on my iPad. A long-form essay about Thoreau from the New Yorker; a Taiwanese animation about the federal election and a Twitter stream about an educator’s take on the upcoming iPad Pro. And, those were between video clips, photos with text embedded in them, feeds from Apple’s News app and Flipboard, and pieces from the Toronto Star’s Star Touch app.

This was also during a week where there was lots of buzz about Twitter’s new Moments news feature and more and more news organizations were bowing to the power of Facebook. There was even word that the New York Times and Google are partnering to send Google Cardboard virtual reality viewers to all its print subscribers. They’ll be able to use the viewers to watch VR videos produced by the Gray Lady.

All that has really made me question what actually constitutes a story on the Internet. And it makes a lie of the notion, still held by some publishers and many media organizations, that simply translating text and picture features from print to online cuts it anymore.

There has never a greater abundance of digitally native story forms and content containers online. And, there have never been more players — traditional and upstart — that want to reinvent, curate and act as publishers and distributers of news — in all its online forms.

Best of all, the tools for producing these news variants are getting cheaper and more capable in concert with their variety.

For example, three years back, the New York Times’ Snowfall feature took the paper months to produce. Today using simple online tools like Storehouse, anyone with an iPad can produce a feature of comparable quality, for free.

Other tools, like canva.com offer content creators the opportunity to make simple but powerful graphics for social media. Google Hangouts and the new blab.io offer free ways to do cross-country video discussion panels with audience participation. And, last week, Instagram released the Boomerang app, which, like Apple’s new Live Pictures feature, allows you to shoot and share one-second video clips to give audiences a live snippet of a scene.

So, given all that, when I see organizations simply take a print publication and turn it into a PDF or, worse, a cheesily animated version of the magazine (yes, issu and myvirtualpaper, I’m talking to you), I despair.

The Internet is a willful media. It rejects story forms that are not native, as does its audience. Readers today are mobile, visual, easily distracted but also can be rabidly engaged. To captivate them, organizations need to explore all the storytelling tools easily available, not just fall back on the ones they are comfortable with. To do otherwise, to quote Thoreau, would be shiftlessness.

Listen to an audio version of this column, read by the author, here.

Wayne MacPhail has been a print and online journalist for 25 years, and is a long-time writer for rabble.ca on technology and the Internet.

Photo: Staci Baird/flickr

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wayne

Wayne MacPhail

Wayne MacPhail has been a print and online journalist for 25 years. He was the managing editor of Hamilton Magazine and was a reporter and editor at The Hamilton Spectator until he founded Southam InfoLab,...