Issue 56  8th April 2016

How the Times of London is making Slack its 'hub for everything'

The Times of London is moving away from a breaking news model to publish at three regular intervals daily. Its internal content publishing workflow will need to change to support this. An increased need for transparent workflow and effective communications means that messaging app Slack, popular with startups, is an important tool in this process.

This article gives a glimpse into how The Times is using Slack to facilitate this change, but also looks at how the tool is being used in other areas to improve content discovery and publishing, as well as letting everyone know what's on the lunchtime menu in The Times café.

The storyteller’s guide to the VR audience

“How do we tell a story for the audience when the audience is present within it?”

This is the central question guiding some fascinating VR audience tests carried out by the team at The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University. Interested in how audiences interpret and participate in VR stories, the team used 90°, 180° and 360° views to assess how audiences would understand and engage with VR stories.

Some of their findings are thought-provoking for anyone interested in VR storytelling. For example, those who watched in 90° became detectives, honing in on small-sometimes insignificant detail and striving to make sense of the scene. Those who watched in 360° were more likely to identify with the emotions and feelings the character in that scene, perhaps because they had far more information to interpret.