Digital innovation editor Alison Gow offers an in-depth look at how Trinity Mirror Regionals keeps its audience engaged with stories.

1. Engaging through innovation
Digital Innovations Team, TMR
Trinity Mirror plc

2. Live and interactive
● Live video - Hangouts on Air
● Live streaming
● Live webcams
● Interactive panoramas: like this and this
● Interactive images like this
● Interactive/animated maps
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Telling stories in new ways, on new platforms

3. Immersive storytelling
Longform ≠ ALL THE WORDS02
Increasing engagement and dwell time

4. Conversations with postboxes
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Ask a postbox for the latest news...

5. Wearables and tangibles
Opportunities for storytelling in unexpected places
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● Google Glass: Giving a the
audience a journalist POV
● Interactive print: Paper
printed with conductive ink to
layer multimedia content on
print
● Liver Bird ‘Internet of
Things’ - connecting an
object to live data to tell
stories

6. Sport engagement
● Breaking news and transfer blogs, especially for the Championship
● News games, data tools, immersive storytelling
05

7. Visual storytelling
Interactive 360 video, Augmented Reality, Gigapixel pictures
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8. Trends and explorations for the next 6 months
• Shallow AND Immersive reads: Serving content to meet audience behaviour/device use
• Interactivity: Images, virtual reality, data visualisation
• Live and ‘as live’ content
• Silent video: Text over images/animation - recognition of the damage autoplay does
• Computer science in newsrooms - we will need to understand what changes are in the algorithms
and the implications/data exchange: No longer enough to accept ‘the algorithm has changed’
• Personalised/intimate journalism/commercial: Continued rise of messenger apps and peer-
recommended news
Skills
• Social media - Social search, Verification, Conversation and familiarity with tone
• Multimedia
• Data
• SEO/search
• Coding - enough to wrangle widgets or articulate a requirement
Commercial/editorial intersection
• Native, Video, Social media
• Push
• Bundling (linked to Native)
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9. THANK YOU
Questions?
Alison Gow
Digital Innovation Editor TMR
@alisongow