Science of Story Building: A Few Thoughts As We Wrap Up
With Matt Sheehan and Annie Neimand
One of the joys of working in a university is being able to access a trove of scholarship that we couldn’t have dreamed existed as practitioners. As we worked on this project, we often felt like Harry, Hermione and Ron exploring Gringott’s vaults. This project was a massive undertaking, and it feels like we’ve only scratched the surface of both the depth of scholarship and rich examples that embody examples of brilliant, science-driven stories. As we find more, we’ll work to share them here.
We’re also pretty excited about some projects that we’ve got ahead of us. We’re working with the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees Innovation Service to explore how their stories apply these principles. We’ll be doing this work in partnership with one of our brilliant research colleagues in the UF College of Journalism and Communications, Yu-Hao Lee. We’re also working with another brilliant colleague, Frank Waddell, to look at how mainstream entertainment media affect perceptions of refugees.
This summer, we’ll take the same approach we used for this project to a partnership with the News Integrity Initiative, this time focusing on finding cognitive, social and behavioral science that local newsrooms can use to better understand their communities and build trust. Read Molly de Aguiar’s brilliant description of our partnership here.
More than anything, we’re excited to hear how you put these principles to work. We undertook this project — in part — to help journalists and changemakers tell more compelling stories about the issues that matter most. In a moment when the truth itself seems to be under siege, we believe we can make it louder by making it far more interesting.
We’d like to again thank our collaborators and partners on helping make this report possible, not only the scholars who joined us, but also our friends at the Knight Foundation: the folks in the journalism program office and our grant director Karen Rundlet, as well as VP communications Andrew Sherry.
With thanks also to our colleagues at the UF College of Journalism and Communication for their support on the project: Dean Diane McFarlin, Randy Bennett, Innovators co-chair Kay Tappan, and postdoc Lauren Griffin who assisted with the original literature review.
