Storytelling beyond the realities

What's Your Story: The Essential Business-Storytelling Handbook

Author: Adri Bruckner, Anjana Menon, Marybeth Sandell

Publisher:  Portfolio Penguin

Pages:284

Price: Rs 599

If you have been a journalist for a reasonable period of time, you’ll probably end up with a feeling of intense déjà vu after reading this book. In that case What's Your Story: The Essential Business-Storytelling Handbook is not for you. Adri Bruckner, Anjana Menon, and Marybeth Sandell — all three communications and content professionals — probably have aspiring communicators/journalists in mind. That’s not a bad thing. This is just an early warning for what not to expect.  

When I joined this newspaper two decades ago, the first thing we were told was to keep the “inverted pyramid” model in mind and make sure we crammed the key details of a news story into the first paragraph — so that any busy Mumbai local traveller can pick up the important details upfront and move to the next story. And that we were purveyors of “stories” and not cannonballs of information. Every piece that we write should have a beginning, a body and some form of ending so that our busy Mumbai local traveller doesn’t feel the need to buy our rival newspaper.

This is hygiene stuff for those who are already neck-deep in the profession; though I must say journalism these days is unrecognisable from what it was back then in many respects. But the fundamentals remain the same and, as such, it’s important for any aspiring reporter or public relations professional — including seasoned veterans — to read up on the raison d’etre of the profession of communication in general and all the important ways it’s changing today, not to mention the evolving standards and rules of the game.

And if you are just about starting out in the business of communication you are quite likely to feel out of your depth in more ways than one. You can feel out of your depth in terms of understanding a subject — in real life things are more complex and technical than your B-School or M-School textbook cases. Or it might be confusing simply because you don’t know where a situation is headed, and you don’t want to misread an issue or make a bad call.

Mind you, What’s Your Story is a slow read. It doesn’t try to project the communicator’s job as something drool-worthy and full of gunfights and car chases. This book is more in the nature of “how to” and “step by step” stuff. It does bring out the fact that journalism teaches you time management, planning, and the value of hustling to get to the bottom of a story.

The book consists of three “parts” (Part 1: Storytelling Elements; Part 2: Storytelling Channels; Part 3: Pulling It All Together), which are again broken down into smaller, more specific segments. Two of the most important things to which the book refers when it discusses the channels of storytelling are the new media outlets and the growing use of sound and images in storytelling. But we’ve all been guilty of taking these things for granted as we try and retrofit them to our story delivery rather than reimagine the very art of storytelling when everything around seems to be in a state of flux.

That said, the good thing about What’s Your Story? is that the gyan comes from the veterans: Ms Bruckner is a creative communications professional with experience in both journalism and PR. Ms Menon, who has worked both in print and television, now runs an outfit that guides global companies on critical content strategy. On her part, Ms Sandell has been a journalist and teacher and now heads employee and leadership communications for Electrolux.  

Having said that, one wishes the authors answered some of the very difficult questions today’s journalists face. Even raising those questions would have been helpful.

When I started out in journalism, PR-driven stories were a rarity. We were actively dissuaded from using “press release material”. If you were writing about a new brand or why it refused to move off the shelves, you’d call the corporation in question and speak to the product head. If you were writing about a healthcare crisis you’d make the effort to speak to some doctors besides a number of those affected. But these days, corporate executives and even healthcare professionals are all fenced off by in-house press managers and outsourced PR professionals, and all your potential sources are warned to avoid the “free-loading hacks” like the plague. How did the situation get to this? If we can’t get the dope from the horse’s mouth, chances are we won’t be able to present the truth as it is.

Of course, the authors have taken a lot of time to extol the virtues of honesty, forthrightness and being straightforward. But the fact remains the barriers to getting there are getting just too high.

Then there’s the issue of political interference. It’s common these days to see editors spiking stories out of fear of one kind of political retribution or the other; you’d have also heard about editors who interfere in the choice of stories in a way that they produce a more “sellable” newspaper. Maybe these are debates for another day.