Contributors to BuzzFeed, The Huffington Post and Reddit focused on storytelling Saturday at the School of Continuing Studies, emphasizing the need to cover stories from unique angles in the age of viral content.
The Storytelling Summit, the first part of the Georgetown Innovation Series, drew approximately 100 students, professors and staff.
“You get a million hits on a boring topic like the government shutdown … by finding the story that no one’s told before, telling it with humor and telling people something that they had never seen before,” BuzzFeed’s Viral Politics Editor Benny Johnson said.
Attendees heard from a variety of speakers, including journalists, university administrators and photographers.
“We wanted to create an event that was unlike anything that any university has hosted before,” Program Manager for Innovation & New Media Strategy Michael Wang (MSB ’07) said. “We wanted to be a thought leader in creating interactive experiences, not just another 60-minute lecture with a famous person.”
The summit’s organizers were called “chefs,” and Wang was “head chef.”
“Quirky is what we’re going for,” Sous-Chef of Design Shantel Jairam (MSB ’15) said.
Vice Provost for Education Randy Bass discussed Designing the Future(s) of the University, an initiative led by Provost Robert Groves that will reinvent the way the university tells stories about itself.
Other speakers included Huffington Post Managing Director Jimmy Soni and reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian.
Following the presentations, the speakers held a variety of workshops that encouraged storytelling without writing.
According to Chef of Special Projects and Experience Helen Brosnan (SFS ’16), the workshops were an important supplement to the keynotes.
“We’re talking about all of these broad ideas, and it’s great and you’re listening … but you don’t get hard skills out of it,” Brosnan said.
Summit attendee Natasha Janfaza (COL ’17) appreciated the day’s focus on less traditional methods of storytelling.
“I enjoy storytelling, but I know that I only really know it in a few modes, like with words or pictures,” Janfaza said. “I wanted to learn about what the future of [storytelling] could be and experiment with it.”
The second part of the Georgetown Innovation Series will consist of a Hackathon in February, during which participants will spend 24 hours solving various problems. One goal of the Storytelling Summit was to empower participants to develop a strong narrative in order to pitch their ideas at the upcoming Hackathon.
Chef of Programming Innocent Obi (SFS ’16) hoped the Storytelling Summit and the Hackathon would be an opportunity for participants to redefine the image of Georgetown students.
“Georgetown is a very policy-based school,” Obi said. “No one really imagines Georgetown students as innovators.”
