ABSTRACT
Videos can be as long or as short as people like: the ads, if they have them, will largely top and tail their report. Story length is limited by the delivery technology - storage space, download speed, memory power. YouTube has enabled unlimited length for videos since 2010, and rather than flood YouTube with 25-minute videos of cats playing, what that move enabled was independent feature-length programmes and original drama. The story structure rules have been subverted in the past, for example in gonzo journalism, but it is the intersection between technologists, entrepreneurs and journalists in new media that is underpinning the experimentation with news narratives that this chapter focuses on. If the journalism of the past was about creating structures that work – the five Ws, the inverted pyramid, the telling the story in four pars, and so on, the journalism of now is about deconstructing the story into discrete parts that can be reassembled in different ways.
