The Web edition of a cover story from Fortune that spring took a sharp turn from what you might expect at a 79-year-old magazine.

Dispensing advice on finding a job during a recession, the piece had a soundtrack, a troupe of improvisational actors from Chicago and about 4,000 fewer words than your average magazine feature. Instead of scrolling through a column of text, readers (if the term can be applied) flipped through nine pages that told the story with a mix of text, photo-illustrations, interactive graphics and video clips.

No one is quite certain what journalism will look like when the Web is done with it, but as Fortune executive editor Steve Koepp put it, “If you’re wondering what does the future of Fortune.com look like, it may be something like that.”

Fortune can’t take all the credit for trying to push storytelling a little further into the digital unknown. It had help from a much younger upstart, Flyp Media, that hopes to prepare these sorts of projects its stock and trade.

An online magazine operating a little more than a year, Flyp (pronounced “Flip”) has no foot in journalism past. Its reporters — mostly freelancers — conceive of their stories as Net creatures beginning to end.

“The notion isn’t just to write a story and thereupon add a video or an audio piece,” explains Flyp senior editor Matthew Schaeffer. “It’s to really figure out the best way to conceptualize these stories as multimedia pieces.”

Flyp, which operates with a staff of about a dozen in a small set of offices in Manhattan, retains some traits of its ink and paper predecessors. Its staff and freelancers assembled a range of material for each biweekly issue, from short editorials on subjects like China’s currency policy to in-depth features and photo spreads. Its Web site even reproduces the…

[Source] dhiram