FLYPmedia is a news magazine Web site that takes news and transforms it into interactive internet storytelling. It started as a satellite project from a Mexican Web site, Indigo, in March of 2008, and has completely revamped the way journalists tell stories.
Lindsey Schneider has been with FLYP almost since it's birth. She claims she's the copy editor, but in the world of new news, that means she also writes, films, manages projects and codes HTML.
Jessica Ernst: How did people initially respond to FLYP when you launched it?
Lindsey Schneider: The response has been overwhelmingly positive. I think people are kind of looking for something new on the web and I think what FLYP attempts to do is that new thing that everyone kind of sees as the next thing. It seems like people kind of like it.
JE: How did you market yourselves?
LS: Mostly we just let the audience come to us, and it’s like I said, it’s just been overwhelmingly positive. We’re at about 25,000 subscribers and a couple thousand hits a day. People are seriously reading and staying on the site for a while.
JE: FLYP says it’s both a magazine and a news website, how do you think those elements are combined?
LS: It’s a hard thing to create a magazine with an issue format online just because all of the other news magazines are doing a different thing. Even print magazines when they post online on their websites, the websites end up looking like a blank HTML page with a bunch of text and maybe they’ll stick on a little video button. But it’s not really a magazine. And so, what we tried to do was think of the magazine, or even individual stories, as these little experience packages.
Everything meshes together. We’re trying to be a magazine in that, up until recently, we came out every other week with an issue. And we’re still working through how to make those issues have the same rhythm and details that a normal print magazine has, and I think we’re almost getting there.
JE: How do your news stories differ form a traditional news web Site?
LS: We can’t do breaking news because we can’t turn around a story in two days, it takes us like a week. We have to design it, find the good photos, and write it and do the video and animation and all that means designing time, exporting time, integrating time.
It’s not merely writing a story and adding multimedia to it and integrating it, it’s more about building that story idea from the start within this multifaceted media approach. We’ve gotten a lot of interest from a lot of different major publications out there, major news groups, and I’m interested in seeing how they would do this in a breaking news format.
JE: How does print, or does it even, influence what you report on?
LS: I wrote a story a really long time ago. The editor in chief at the time had seen a feature story in the New York Times magazine and she was like, ‘No, they just didn’t do the media right. It doesn’t work in print.’ And so, we did that story over again with multimedia and just liked it so much better.
JE: Where do you find your story ideas and how do you decide how you are going to publish them and what media you are going to use?
LS: Most of my story ideas come from other people on staff or freelancers that give us story ideas and then we develop them. We try to pick story ideas that print mediums can’t do or couldn’t do as well as that story needs to be told.
Recently we did this story on this group called The Magician’s Table, and it’s this group of magicians that have been having lunch together every Friday in New York City. That could not be told in print. It had to be told in video with them doing their tricks.
JE: How long does it usually take you to create a story?
LS: Well, it depends on the story. Sometimes it could take up to two weeks and sometimes it could take four days, not including the leave reporting time. You take reporting time out, which could take up to six months.
We can turn out a story in two days, but it might not have all the multimedia elements that we choose.
JE: What do you think news media will look like ten years from now?
LS: I personally am a big print person, I like books and I like holding books. I could never have a kindle, ever.
I think that there’s an opening out there for something that’s like FLYP but better. I don’t think that print is gunna die; I think print is struggling. But I think print is struggling because it’s unable to grapple with its own problems.
There are instances where it would be perfectly legitimate for someone to move online and start something like FLYP or something like Departures. I don’t know, you can never really say.
Obviously the media’s in a crisis moment. I think video is almost the key. I think video is where it’s all gunna go. Everyone’s already migrating to web video. Who doesn’t watch Hulu? I think that online short documentary journalism is the future.
Photo Credit: Lindsey Schneider
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