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I will be working on some sort of news game for our tween girl demographic.

Wed Aug 16, 2007 12:30 AM
Ok so I’ve been brainstorming ideas for the past couple days and looking at more girly web sites and I keep going back to Flip.com… I think I might be obsessed with it. It’s the quintessential tween girl web site, which is probably why I’m obsessed with it – that was not meant to be creepy as much as it was meant to be gay.

The great part about it is the girls get to put things they like, an expression of themselves in the flip book and then pick out different background and tacky sparkle letters, etc. But it can be so much more… you can link videos and web sites to it, etc.

Here’s a link to one that I made when I was fooling around with it months ago. It was something for my blog (I write a weekly top favorite things in my blog). I never ended up using it or finishing it, but I still thought it would give you all some kind of idea.

Jordan’s Flip Book.

It also only has one page, which I know defeats the purpose of calling it a flip book, but just imagine more similar pages…

Here’s one that Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour made.


Now how to add the news to this platform? More coming later. Mull over these ideas (is that the correct phrase?). And I’ll start thinking of the news elements that are or could be involved.

Thursday 9:00 AM

I was thinking of an idea of “Things that affect me” kind of deal since tweens are all about themselves. It kind of plays off of that idea I said for locker stalker of adding like if a photo of you ended up in the paper, you could save it in your locker. This would be a bit different.

The target publication would no doubt be local, probably a local paper or something. And online they would have available their normal content. What I propose is a type of widget where tweens or really, anyone, could highlight text, or click on a picture and an option would be to add to “Their Content.” I don’t know how many papers are putting comics online, but they could do it with those as well. So that would basically just be a personal space where all these things would be collected and archived.

The fun part comes next.

They can put that content into a flipbook like deal. Archiving different articles and events, adding their own commentary and pictures. Telling the story in a different way. They could chose to make it a lot like a timeline. So they could go back to a day or a week and see what was important to them. I think it wouldn’t make sense if we didn’t allow them to add their own pictures, text and content to their archives so they could add that to the book as well.

The flip.com thing is really easy to use as far as erasing and resizing. Sure it’s not the best quality ever, but it seems good enough for teen girls.

Thursday (or I guess technically Friday) 1:00 AM.

I’ve been trying in my head to iron out the details of how to get these girls onto a news web site. It would be nice to add a news element to an existing site, but that makes me nervous because I doubt Flip.com will be at the ONA, nor do I think will many girly fun sites. This will probably be a continuous problem, especially since we really have no clue which organizations will be interested. I almost find this as a huge flaw of the project. We have to create something for news organizations, a very broadly defined thing, but yet it would seem the best ides have a narrower scope about them.

At least last year the people who did it knew they were doing it for AOL or Time Warner or whatever so they already had a strong base to build off of, innovate a new idea for AOL to use. Sounds way easier than just make an idea that’s adaptable to all sorts of demographics, but have no idea what kind of news you’ll be presenting, how much money you’ll have or how many resources will be provided. Or really even, if anyone even will want it.

Anyways, I was thinking about what andrea commented below and it seems to me that the best way to get the kids involved is to force their involvement. (I really didn’t mean for that to sound like we would be inflicting pain on them… ) So let’s say a local paper picks up the idea. Even in a town like mine which has about 50,000 people, I think getting a test group of girls in middle school would be easy. Kids love getting out of class and the local newspaper has a great relationship with the school district. So you pick 50 girls out from different classes, ask them to play with the site and see what they think. Really that would just be a marketing ploy because you know they’ll tell all their friends exactly what they were doing and their jealous friends will want to see for themselves. If it’s cool enough, it will stick. If not, we’ll look like asses and the girls will laugh at us.