Insights & Idea Stories: Delivering long form editorial content

In the online editorial and content strategy space, more and more news and editorial staff members and their teams are asking for the tools and means to create engaging and interactive long form editorial pieces. Some organizations have fully-integrated editorial teams of editors, content creators, artists, developers, journalists, and illustrators that can deliver beautiful one-off pieces, but this is not the case for every group. Enabling authors to create immersive editorial pieces with a highly flexible, media-rich and engaging content is a present-day challenge.

In October 2014, Stanford's Graduate School of Business launched its new Insights section. This news portion of the school's public website delivers long form editorial pieces that authors can customize with various sized images, callouts, sidebars, and more, plus implements card-style media integration. These "Idea Stories" are incredibly flexible for authors, and our solution to the request for "Snowfall" type pieces.

This talk will discuss the requirements and the resulting deliverables of the Insights section and Idea Story content type. I will share our strategy and process, the challenges we faced, our successes and failures, and the struggle of getting to "Medium-style" authoring in Drupal 7.