By Hope Keller, J-Lab Deputy Director
After nearly a year of collecting content, the Stories That Fly crew launched its online magazine May 2 with a fete for aviation enthusiasts, Kent State University faculty and students and members of the public.
Several pilots flew in to the University Airport and caught a free shuttle provided by the university’s flight school to get to the celebratory barbecue on time, wrote student reporter Leila Archer in a May 4 story for StoriesThatFly.com.
As his site got off the ground, editor and project leader Joe Murray – a Kent State journalism professor and a pilot – reports that Stories That Fly, or STF, will begin a partnership with the Denver-based PilotMag, which has a hard-copy circulation of 800,000 and receives 3 million Web-site visits a year. One of Murray’s feature-length articles appears in PilotMag’s May-June issue and another will be published in July-August. Both stories are illustrated with photos by student photographers.
PilotMag would like to incorporate STF into its Web-site redesign and share its own videos and stories on the STF site, adds Murray, who will discuss further opportunities with PilotMag’s publisher this summer.
Murray also reports that he is developing a partnership with Kent State’s aeronautics and flight program, “We can leverage their expertise in flight education and safety in a lot of good ways.”
He is also happy to report that Stories That Fly has snagged the attention of the editor of AOPA Flight Training and AOPA Pilot magazines. Murray said the editor would like to run a story about Stories That Fly in one or both of the national aviation magazines, which have a combined hard-copy circulation of 493,000 and log more than 5 million online visits annually.
Stories That Fly also has received accolades from other aviation industry insiders and publishers, including JetWhine.com, Rent-A-Plane.com, MagazineLaunch.com, Plane and Pilot News (April 2009, page 5), General
Aviation News, Airplane Geeks and ThirtyThousandFeet.com.
Murray has met his second-year New Voices match and also has applied for two other grants to sustain and advance his project. The awards would allow his team to expand its coverage of aviation and the environment and extend its reach into rural Ohio communities and airfields, Murray says.
So far, 20 photojournalism students have contributed pictures, 25 writing students have provided stories and research, and about 100 people have taken part in articles and interviews. In addition, 284 people have signed up to follow STF on Twitter and 40 have joined the site as subscribers.
The Stories That Fly site employs several up-to-date features to engage its audience, including an eye-catching 3-D Wall that functions as the site’s home page, a user-commenting feature and a 10-star voting system for all content, a Flickr group and a YouTube channel. Users can submit original content and receive updates via Twitter.
Site user David McCartney contributed a story about a Florida subdivision that is centered around an airfield. “Imagine the thrill of living a few feet from your own airplane and wishing it ‘sweet dreams’ every night from just down the hall,” he writes – adding, however, that some of the community’s home hangars are used as “ballroom dance floors.”
Whatever floats your boat – or your plane. Stories That Fly also offers a three-minute feature about the pilot of a “float boat,” a small plane with pontoons that can land on and take off from water as well as land. Murray shot the footage himself, from the ground and aboard the bright yellow aircraft. He talks with pilot Dan Marks as Marks traces the course of a river and buzzes above the green summer countryside. The video story leaves you wanting more. It is also educational: Viewers learn that if they don’t retract the landing gear on their pontoons before setting down on water, they’re likely to capsize the plane.
Photos by Stories That Fly staff.
