The Problem

We know that users are delighted by and engage with immersive storytelling. The landscape of the media industry has also changed: storytelling is no longer only done via words, but highlights audio, video, and photo. In some cases, these multimedia elements drive the story more than the words themselves.

For The Washington Post, we’ve seen this with the success of our centered layout stories on the custom template by the news graphic design team – both of which often rely on the heavy use of multimedia and unique design.

The crux of our problem is that:

• Volume: we are not giving users as much multimedia content/storytelling as they are willing to consume

• Tooling: it is difficult for our newsroom to create multimedia-centric story layouts

• Discovery: the ones that are created aren’t discoverable

Other than the custom template, we have very limited flexibility on what we can create that feels immersive and highlights media. Our users are limited in how much of this type of storytelling they can discover, consume, and recirculate through because we don’t have a standard or scalable way to produce these types of storytelling experiences that are truly media-first.

Newsroom has often relied on STAMPs to achieve this goal, however STAMPs are a remnant of the Google AMP world, mostly a hack that we no longer want to maintain. Once a storytelling tool, they have evolved into mostly just being used as standalone photo galleries. As STAMPs don’t live in our ecosystem, they are hard to monetize and recirculate users upon completion and also hard for our internal users to create and edit them. The form of the STAMP also does not meet the function of what they are trying to do.