#contquest - Matt Thompson - Content Manager NPR - Project Argo
 
·      Willa Cather - There are only two or three human stories … 
·      The Monomyth
·      The Cost Conundrum
·      The Giant Pool of Money - This American Life
·      Treat it as a quest - Why quests 
·      Talking Points Memo - Great journalism begins with a great question. If you have a great questions - you already have what you need.
·      Why?
·      ProPublica - Tell us your story -- started with just a callout - tell us what happened?
·      Created sub-stories that all answered this quests. Paul Kiehl
·      Follow along on Twitter - unfolding quest
·      Quests can sprawl - primal storytelling format 
·      Thrive on transparency
·      Invite participation
·      Game of Thrones fan community - inhabit the universe and make it larger - advantages of the form 
·      Quests have a template 
·      Consistent features - Can be replicated
·      Quest object  - artifact 
·      The Call to Adventure (the great injustice)
·      Soon BankSimple is started (now just Simple)
·      Quests, transparency, participation 
·      Sell the question not the answer. Sell the mission not the product
·      If you can sell the mission or purpose you hook them into an unending sprawling narrative
·      It should somewhat controversial 
·      The biggest ideas seem to threaten your identity, you wonder if you have the ambition - Paul Graham 
·      Don't try to construct the future like a building. Be like Columbus. Forge out.
·      The protagonists are key to the story 
·      Get rich slowly - day by day we carve out this adventure 
·      Empathy 4GIFs.com (Spiderman piñata)
·      Who struggles,who's accessible. 'Show us your struggles.' 
·      Tell us the uncertainties and tell us what we don't know.
·      Planning the quest
·      What's your world domination plan? Planning is key
·      Start with personas -- different type of people you are trying to reach in very specific terms 
·      Themes - what resonates with the audience (food, relationships, get the high level themes)
·      Questions - What are the journalistic questions 

• Persona > Educator
• Theme > Curricula
• Question > How are curricula changing?
• Quest > Write the ultimate guide. Respond to authority.

 

• Investigate in a number of micro stories everything and wrap them all together in the Ultimate Guide to X
• Mind/Shift: How We Will Learn is the outcome

 

• Robin Sloan - KickStarter - little marketplace for creative projects 

 

• Access to experiments, milestones

 

• Set aside a fund for the "remix project" - let's do something interesting with the scheme 
• Publishing is a beginning not an end. 
• When you put your content online the quest just starts and try to building those milestones into a your content plan.

 

• Pitfalls - it depends who you are  -- WebMD, for example
• Theme capture Fans > Friends > Foreigners (Drive-bys)

 

• It's very easy to concentrate your effort on your fans and not your foreigners  - the goal for each of the Argo sites whether they are an app or a site to bring people from the outer rim of the circle into the interior.

 

• Every week the editor/reporters had to create banner post that don't need any contacts or place-setting and hooks them into the on-going quest.
• Bring in folks that don;t already know your narrative.

 

• Don't be a #brandcastle -- a media entity obsessed with itself. People always less inserted than you are with yourself. Remember that.

 

• You rarely get
  • What happened before the thing we are reporting on 
• Even more rare: What we don't know yet (exposing what you don't know and vulnerability)

 

• When is the quest done and do we worry about not trying to find an end-point. 

 

• You sell the mission not the product
• We want the journey. We're sort of indifferent about the destination. And once we get it, we're kid of mad at it.

 

• Setting termination points immediately sets limitations that devalue the quest. 

 

• Be invited along on the quest. 

 

• The Tolkien map again -- IA and Design 
• But there are always aspects of the map that bleed off into unknown areas.

 

• NPR does SCRUM and comes up with user stories -- and the end of two weeks -- as a user I want to accomplish that story.

 

• The story then breaks down into to-do's
• You have a story
• You have a battle
• You have a thing you are striving for.

 
 

• Code Year -- each day you get a lesson -- what if higher education did this? How do we hook you into this on-going narrative of how we get there. Manageable, structured, fun, fulfilling

 

• How do we handle the end of the world?
• How we do we communicate?
• Are you ready for the zombie apocalypse?
• How do we create excitement? 

 

• Zombie Run example - iPhone app 

 

• "Big organizations want to project this image that they are transparent, but there's a cultural problem there that the framework really can't help with. It's a case for transparency."

 

• “Site runner” 

 

• Tell us what you want -- in public -- what are your questions and problems -- how do you think we deal with it? 
• Transparency: Really valuable resource for NPR; Direct conduit to the audience.
• MetaTalk / MetaFilter -- where people care about community can gather and share -- without that value the larger community can't exists.

 

• Create a destination that's a scant of the decimation itself. InsiderNPR.org ThisisNPR.org -- Project Argo was mandated to write about "what we would do differently" -- noble, tons of value.