It all started with Ernest Shackleton.
For the 100 year anniversary of his historic voyage to Antarctica, another Harvard Business School Marketing team member and I wanted to create a feature story with more whiz and bang than anything HBS had produced so far.
The feature article was designed to include media of all kinds - videos, podcasts, pull quotes, sidebars, charts, you name it. But mainly, it was designed to be flashy.
The idea was to distinguish these articles from the standard press release article style, and to showcase original HBS content in the vein of microsites.
The style was a roaring success.
HBS began using it for many new stories, of all varieties. Directing photography proved an integral part of the process - finding something general enough to be a background but specific, atmospheric, and evocative enough to pull people into stories.
The style was eventually used for features on HBS' publication, Working Knowledge.
Over the course of 2 years, we created over 40 feature articles - affectionately dubbed "the fancy news template" internally, these now make regular appearances in our newsroom.
