Our team at Dry Fly Media is pleased to announce the launch of a new media project we’ve been working on for a few months now – The Paspartu Project.
The Emergence of Long Form Storytelling
We’ve been fascinated with the ‘long form’ approach to storytelling ever since the impressive New York Times piece – Snow Fall – first landed in December 2012, drawing heaps of praise from near and far along with projections that web (and traditional) journalism might be forever altered given its impact.
The combination of a long form, compelling narrative with rich media made quite a splash at the time, though word spread that a veritable army of talent worked on the hand-coded project for months prior to its delivery.
Hey, We Should Really Look at This…
Without a doubt we weren’t the only fly fishers who fantasized about applying the long form schema to the world of fly fishing, though addressing the technical issues (particularly eighteen months ago) was pretty much an insurmountable (dammit) obstacle.
Even inimitable writer and fly fisher Tom Chandler chimed in on the long form phenomenon back in January, aptly capturing the experience – and curiosity – of many of us writing and ‘publishing’ in WordPress.
As a team who is about to start their eighth year of writing about fly fishing in WordPress, like TC we’re ever thankful for the WordPress framework. WordPress is constantly evolving for the better, it’s easy, open source, SEO-friendly and imposes a reasonably lightweight server burden in most cases.
But WordPress has its limits, particularly when viewed through the prism of long form storytelling (big storytelling in Chandler’s words). Even though there are long form inroads being forged on the WordPress front, it’s ‘not quite there’ yet.
Dude, Just Do Another Digital Magazine…
In exploring the long form options, we starting knocking on doors and chatting with people about the concepts and technical platforms required, even badgering some fairly large publishers and web houses along the way.
Somewhat surprisingly, many suggested we ‘just do another digital magazine’, citing the complexities and ‘big publishing house’ demands of a genuine long form site.
As a team, overall we’re passionate supporters of the digital magazine format which has become so pervasive in fly fishing (North American > world) these days, though as publishers of Swing the Fly we’d be the first to admit there are some rather profound limitations in the digital magazine format when it comes to long form storytelling; limitations that frankly are long form deal killers given today’s technology.
So Just Tell the (Long Form) Story…
After fiddling around the edges, we’ve fallen into the abyss of learning the ins and outs of yet another chunk of software and have developed a model to create fly fishing’s first dedicated long form portal – The Paspartu Project.
Paspartu is taken from the French passe-partout [pas-pahr-too], which in historical use (1645-ish) meant literally it goes everywhere.
Passe-partout evolved over time to mean something that passes everywhere or provides a universal means of passage; think something akin to a master key.
As we played with this project concept in the months leading up to our launch, we kicked around a number of names that resonated with our ambition to dig deeper into stories in the fly fishing arena that are not being optimally told in traditional media. The idea of a master key of sorts providing passage to a broader story was a natural fit.
We’ll cover one topic per ‘issue’ – our goal is to look at each topic from top to bottom, inside and out, talking to fishers in the know that very likely aren’t on the typical fly fisher’s (or often the fly fishing media’s) radar, and weave in balanced presentation of rich media that helps tell the story.
Easier said than done, and we’ll no doubt make our share of mistakes along the way. But we’ll get better.
And the story concepts that have come flooding in from fishy friends around the country have been mind-bogglingly good.
There Are Only So Many Hours in the Day…
We’ve been frankly overwhelmed with interest in The Paspartu Project and getting this baby up and running; so much so that we’re no longer able to be involved with Swing the Fly magazine. We certainly wish the best to Zack and the team as we transition out of that project over the next several weeks.
