Upendra Shardanand

TechCrunch says it’s The End of Handcrafted Content.

It may seem that way, because the art of storytelling is being disrupted. Disrupted by social and community. The melding of text, photography, video, and flash. The real-time web, algorithms, and data analysis. Readers in control of the navigation and interaction.

Storytellers online can’t tell stories the same way they did on print and expect it to be compelling. The analytics showing the one-pageview-per-visit for articles prove that.

The real problem is that storytellers are using the same authoring tool to write stories for the web that they use for print. A text editor. For those in print businesses, they are particularly handcuffed since they need the same tool to publish to two places – print and the web. So the tools force the authors to create “print” experiences online.

For the savvy and telling stories only online, they are armed with a text editor, and a hodge podge of other tools cobbled around it, but that hodge podge hasn’t really helped to make a beautiful, integrated web experience that takes full advantage of the capabilities of the medium.

But it’ll get there. What’s needed are tools for storytelling that let the authors have directly control over the output, and interact with it as it evolves. Tools that let editors create and curate immersive, integrated, beautiful experiences that seamlessly blend content, community, algorithms, and analytics.

Hand-crafted content will be more live than ever – once the tools are there for the hands to do their work.