At a moment's glance, you can review these and understand quite a bit about both shows. The power of this display is the story is always a complete circle, regardless of overall length. It doesn’t matter that ‘A Prairie Home Companion’ is twice as long as ‘Morning Edition,’ because they each have their own unique pace and structure. We thought it would make for a very interesting visual display to have all of the clips in a story be a different period of the clock. That way, people could very easily see what clips in their story was taking up the most time.

It became obvious that to implement the clock well would be a lot of work. Many other pieces of the story creation functionality were still up in the air when we started, making it even more difficult to design. Clip cards, narration, and a few other pieces were just coming together.

The clock is an incredibly exciting idea, but we need to find some more time to think through some of these questions and understand how they impact both the story and the person making it. I am excited to think about how we might be able to fit this into future versions. At the moment I see it fitting in beautifully during the editing process of a story.

I know what you’re thinking, it’s just a circle, that can’t be that hard to add? I’ll give you an open question we still have yet to answer: how should we handle secondary/supporting (commonly referred to as b-roll) material when displaying a story in this way? Are those lines that are used in the Morning Edition clock good enough? Can you add clips to the story from this screen?