What makes a great story

Inside Look: How do you tell a story everyone’s already telling?

Everyone with a smartphone can capture a moment, but turning that moment into a story people remember takes more than a camera.

In this on-demand session from The Studio by PhotoShelter, Amber Ferguson, senior social producer at The Root, and Deepa Lakshmin, head of social media and video at Lonely Planet, sit down with Natalia Chung, PhotoShelter’s director of communications and content, to talk about how they get more out of every photo and video they capture.

Quick takeaways from the session

• Look past the main event. One of Amber’s most-viewed clips from a major 2024 news moment came from filming what happened before the speech, not the speech itself.
• Give people a reason to care. Without context, a video is just one more post in someone’s feed, and it’s forgotten as soon as they scroll.
• Check user-generated content before you share it. AI-generated video has made it much harder to confirm who filmed something and whether it’s real.
• If you miss the shot, be honest about it. Deepa explains how shaky underwater footage became one of Lonely Planet’s best videos for gaining new followers.
• Organize photos and videos as you go. Labeling footage by location and adding notes makes it easy to bring back old content when a topic becomes timely again.
• Unused footage isn’t wasted. Interviews that never ran can turn into a new story months later.

Quotes on visual storytelling from The Root and Lonely Planet

“A great storyteller always asks, ‘Why does this matter? Why should someone care?'” Amber Ferguson, The Root

“You put two different people in the same country, they’re gonna come back with two totally different pieces of content, because their content and the storytelling is gonna be informed by their lived experience.” Deepa Lakshmin, Lonely Planet

“I’m a human first before I’m a storyteller.” Amber Ferguson, The Root

“Anyone can be a content creator, but being a meaningful storyteller is still a craft and a skill.” Amber Ferguson, The Root

Meet the speakers

Amber Ferguson is the senior social producer at The Root. She spent nine years at The Washington Post as an overnight video editor, general assignment reporter, senior video journalist, and rapid response culture reporter.

Deepa Lakshmin is the head of social media and video at Lonely Planet, where she leads the brand’s social and video strategy. She started her career in journalism as a writer.