The News vs The Story
Programming note: I'm aiming for this to be a weekly newsletter, but sometimes events will interrupt that, as was the case the last 10 days. Readers may request a refund here.
The last edition was a more current events-driven newsletter, so this week, I want to dive into a more evergreen, longer-standing observation.
Let's paint a picture, one that's probably familiar to more than a few of my readers. Hal AI, a company I just made up, is a Series B-stage startup focused on generative AI audio. They have a new feature suite coming that lets customers do all sorts of nifty things with music tracks.
The founder-CEO pounds the metaphorical table and says, "Our product is now so much better than anyone else's - it's 1.3x faster, 20% less memory intensive, and has a FLORP benchmark rating* of 55. The company is already adding 100,000 users a day as it is. This is all big news, and we deserve big attention for the announcement."
On the other end of that conversation is most likely some young in-house comms person and their eager-to-please agency (full of even younger, less experienced comms people, but that's a newsletter for another day), who jump to work figuring out how to jeuje up the news with superlatives and fluffed-up language to make the stats the founder-CEO loves stand out from the crowd.
Launch day comes around, the announcement blog post goes live, but there's little social chatter or media attention. Why?
A failure to distinguish between The News and The Story.
This is probably the most common error I see committed in tech comms, or any industry's comms for that matter. While there's a greater tendency to commit this mistake among junior people, I've seen senior comms leaders do it from time to time as well. And all but the most seasoned of founders, execs, and investors make this error often.
The News is information about a happening or occurrence. It's straightforward, specific to the event, and follows a linear order. The best news focuses on facts and details in order to inform.
The Story is narrative about a person or people. It's context-dependent, speaks to broader truths or ideas, and follows an arc. The best stories focus on tension, conflict, and surprise in order to influence.
People's desire to consume The News depends on their interests and the intensity of that interest. People's desire to consume The Story is universal, as long as it's a story well told.
How do companies fail to focus on Story, then? A few reasons. The scenario I outlined above, where an exec places pressure to present a particular story in a specific way, is one. Another comes down to comms people themselves not being attuned enough (usually due to being junior) to what journalists consider a Story. Bad PR agencies focused on playing an outreach volume game are at fault, too, approaching storytelling like guys who rig a stylus to swipe right on every Tinder profile.
A super-common way it happens is founders and execs think the information they've presented to investors about product-market fit, user acquisition, revenue growth, etcetera, or a brilliant demo they did at the company all-hands is The Story, and push it down throughout their organizations as gospel. After all, it convinced people to give them money or rally behind their cause internally—what more proof of persuasiveness do you need?
But while these things might have seeds of Story within them that can be explored further, they're not the thing itself. The Washington Posts's Taylor Lorenz wrote about this on her Substack in a piece (wonderfully and succinctly titled "Your success is not a story") I reference regularly:
The most common pitch I get goes something like this: Hi, I’m X, I think you should write about [how I or my company achieved some great success]... These stories aren’t interesting to readers primarily because they have no tension aside from the subject (who is only framed positively), overcoming some perceived obstacle. They pretty much always gloss over what’s really going on and they don’t leave the reader with any surprising revelations or tangible ideas to think about.
This also happens to be the same reason most efforts to "go direct" with storytelling fail. The stories companies tend to craft about themselves tend to lack sufficient tension, conflict, and surprise and thus are... well, boring. Hagiography just isn't interesting to those outside the congregation.
But the main reason people fail to achieve a good Story? Story is really hard. It takes time, creativity, reflection, and craft. Story has to be cultivated and uncovered. Rare is the case where the story is evident, just lying around.
But the companies and organizations that have the talent and devote the resources to doing it are the ones who stand out and, ultimately, the ones who win.
*There is no FLORP benchmark rating. Yet.