Redefining Local Journalism with Talk Media
Social Ventures Zone and Transmedia Zone startup Talk Media (external link) is an events and experience company that partners with local journalists in Toronto. Their upcoming project, Toronto Rewind, is a Carnival-like event where participants interact with curated news from local journalists. In partnership with journalists from across Toronto, the event allows audiences to participate in activities and interact with journalists who are experimenting with innovative storytelling techniques.
The company, led by Adam Chen and Aurora Zboch, began two years ago shortly before being accepted into the Transmedia Zone and Social Ventures Zone. The team has since grown to include individuals with backgrounds in journalism, packaging design, marketing, and interactive design.
Zboch met Chen while they were both studying at the School of Journalism, during an international multimedia reporting trip in Hong Kong. The pair connected through reporting on stories together and eventually developed the concept for Talk Media.
Zone Learning has helped them grow as entrepreneurs, while connecting them with a network of mentors and peers. For Chen, this was essential in developing a new local journalism platform.
Talk Media team members Adam Chen and Aurora Zboch, Photo: Katie Swyers
An image of the Toronto Rewind special edition storytelling home-delivered package, Photo: Katie Swyers
“I learned how important it is to have space, to have people around you going through a similar thing,” says Chen. “We've invented a completely new way of doing journalism, a completely new platform for people to interact with journalism, and a new way for journalists to tell their stories.”
“TalkMedia... focuses on creating opportunities for audiences to interact with journalism in ways that create memories and new connections, instead of pulling people apart,” he adds.
As a graduate student from the Ryerson School of Journalism, Chen recalls trying to find his space in the media industry, dabbling in broadcasting, feature writing, newsletter editing and social media production.
It wasn’t until he attended a live performance by Pop Up magazine, that he realized this was the direction he wanted to head.
“What matters to us is making sure that people feel delighted by what we do, that they feel like it's something that isn't necessarily medicine, but actually something they enjoy doing.”
Toronto Rewind is the result of a year of prototyping and testing to create an interactive platform featuring digital versions of Toronto's neighborhoods.
The space is hosted on gather.town, an interactive site that allows users to customize and design their own event spaces. Proximity based webcams allow guests to interact with each other and various multimedia components in the space.
“You can explore and interact with really cool stories that we've curated by local journalism outlets and from different storytellers,” says Chen.
“We can build a museum of stories and build an adventure, or just build a conference space for people to sit back while interacting with the story” adds Zboch, who produced and designed Rewind’s interactive space.
“As soon as people drop into the Gather space, everything they see is pretty much something I've made by hand. I've done the graphic design and made the backgrounds and the majority of the map that people are wandering through.”
Zboch and Chen are also two of the six of the storytellers featured at Toronto Rewind. They are accompanied by four other journalists spanning three different editorial partners, each presenting a multimedia story at the pop-up event.
Zboch and Chen putting up Toronto Rewind posters across Kensington Market, Photo: Katie Swyers
For Zboch, being a part of Zone Learning has meant connecting with people to help them transform their stories in the journalism industry. “Now that we're building a network of other media partners, and people who are interested in what we're doing, it's proving to them that this is a format that can be applied to a lot of stories,” she says.
As for what the future holds, Zboch and Chen are excited to branch out to in-person events, once COVID-19 safety measures allow. Until then you can meet and interact with them at Toronto Rewind (external link) on November 10 and 12.