The Flip Side
A news briefing concept I created and shared for the Pew Charitable Trust and LivingFacts.org while working to build a business for The Weather Channel’s voice offerings.
Extending the reach of great content
When the Pew Charitable Trust approached us, they were looking for new ways to put their content in front of a bigger audience. While their insights weren’t a fit for The Weather Channel’s voice apps, they are highly informative, surprising, and create wow or aha! moments. I remembered that , during testing, users had told me they look to voice assistants and conversational interfaces to learn something new. What better way to help Pew share data and give users access to new information than to modify Pew’s existing concept and put it out as a Flash Briefing for Alexa or a news feature for the Google assistant?
The Social News.
The content was great and it was well written. But, it need a little something to alert the user that there’s something interesting coming. So, I reworked and edited existing content to give it a hook.
Here, the existing article mostly worked. So, I wrote the introduction and left the original article mostly untouched. I think the body text could be edited for brevity and SSML tags might improve comprehension.
But, all in all, I think this example represents the potential of Pew’s content on voice.
Gen X & the Great Recession
While the first concept was a great fit, others were more challenging. To show Pew, I adapted an article about Generation X , wealth, and the great recession to this news briefing concept. The hook worked beautifully, but the information is hard to digest, since there are so many numbers used as points of comparison.
I did copy edit a bit for them, but I didn’t do a full rewrite. My point was to show them how the might think of ‘dryer’ more research-oriented content within this format. I also provided them with guidance on how to think about copy in the context of audio and introduced concepts like table reads to help them think about how users might hear such content and how to write for an audio format.