From Town Criers to Tech: The Evolution of Storytelling in Hastings| Ep.02
Image Photo Credit: HastingsNow.com/ashley
Style: Studio-Ghibli Whimsy
What It Looks Like: Soft pastels, hand-painted brushwork, floating lanterns
Why It’s Hot: Anime nostalgia dominates TikTok & Simplified’s prompt boards.
One-Line GPT-4o Prompt Template*: “Quiet mountain town at dusk, studio-Ghibli style, painterly clouds, cozy glow, whimsical.”
A journey through history to today – how Hastings’ ways of sharing news have transformed from shouted announcements and print papers to immersive Stiva stories and Soundbite podcasts.
The Echoes of History in How We Share News
If you time-traveled to Hastings in the 1800s, how would you learn what’s happening around town? Perhaps by a notice pinned at the general store, a neighbor’s word-of-mouth, or the weekly newspaper carried by stagecoach. Fast forward to 2025, and the differences are night and day – or so it seems at first. In truth, the core methods of local storytelling have always revolved around the same pillars: the spoken word, the written word, and imagery. What’s changed dramatically are the tools and speed.
Let’s take a quick tour through time on how Hastings (and communities like it) have shared their stories:
The Town Crier Era (1800s): Long before Hastings had a newspaper (the first local paper, The Hastings Conserver, launched in 1863), news often traveled by word of mouth. Town criers or just chatty neighbors were the go-to “news feed.” Important announcements might be made at church gatherings or in the town square. This was storytelling in its oral form – immediate, human, but fleeting (if you didn’t hear it firsthand, you relied on someone else to relay it).
Print and Photograph Revolution (Late 19th – 20th Century): As Hastings grew, so did print media. By 1866, The Hastings Gazette began publishing, and later the Hastings Star Gazette carried on weekly publication until as recently as 2020 mnhs.org. Newspapers brought text and images to center stage. A black-and-white photo of a new bridge over the Mississippi could capture imaginations, while detailed articles recorded local events for posterity. Print was powerful: it provided a lasting record (you could cut out an article and save it), and it spread widely – but it was still mostly one-way communication. Readers consumed the news, but the interaction was limited to perhaps a Letter to the Editor weeks later.
Radio and TV (Mid-20th Century): The advent of local radio (and eventually local cable access TV) added voice and video into the mix for the first time. Now Hastings residents could hear the news – the excitement in a broadcaster’s voice after a Raiders football victory, or the solemn tone when reporting a flood on the Mississippi. They could see moving images of community events on TV. These media made local storytelling more dynamic and engaging, but they were also centralized – only those with broadcasting equipment had the megaphone. It was still largely a one-to-many model.
The Internet & Social Media (2000s): Enter the era of blogs, Facebook, and beyond. Suddenly everyone could be a publisher. This should have been the golden age of community storytelling – and in some ways, it was. Hastings folks started Facebook groups to share historical photos; the city’s website posted updates; local bloggers wrote about city council meetings. Yet, as Ashley and Peter observed, something was missing. The online world became noisy. Global social platforms weren’t built for small-town news – a post about a Hastings bake sale sits in the same feed as breaking national news and cat memes. Many local voices got drowned out. By 2023, Hastings had plenty of digital chatter, but no unified local channel where the community could truly tune into itself.
HastingsNow’s Innovation: Marrying the Old and the New
Enter HastingsNow.com – our community’s answer to the question: How do we bring the best of those historical storytelling methods into the modern age? The answer was to combine them all. HastingsNow’s signature Stiva stories are a direct homage to the four pillars of storytelling: text, image, video, and audio hastingsnow.com, hastingsnow.com. Think about that – it’s essentially the town crier (audio) + the newspaper (text + images) + the TV report (video), all wrapped into one experience on your phone or computer. What’s revolutionary is not any single piece, but the fusion of them in a cohesive way.
Peter often explains that HastingsNow “builds on these four pillars of storytelling, combining them in a modern way to maximize local impact.” hastingsnow.com Here’s how each element plays its part in a Stiva story (using a recent example, say “Celebrating 10 Years of Lock & Dam Eatery” – a real Stiva that HastingsNow published):
Text: The written narrative provides depth and detail. In the Lock & Dam Eatery story, text might set the scene of the 10-year celebration, recount the owner’s journey, and list the special dishes served at the anniversary event. Text is searchable and permanent – weeks or months later, a Google search can surface that article, ensuring the story doesn’t fade away hastingsnow.com. That permanence is something even old newspapers gave us, and it remains crucial online.
Images: A gallery of high-resolution photos let readers see the smiles of patrons, the golden fry of the celebrated walleye sandwich, the historic building’s decor. One “single photo can capture the spirit of Hastings at a glance,” as HastingsNow’s team likes to say hastingsnow.com. Indeed, images grab attention in social feeds and evoke emotion instantly – a truth known since the first photographers in town in the 1860s. On HastingsNow, images are used strategically to make stories “pop” and to help residents immediately recognize familiar faces and places hastingsnow.com.
Video: Clicking play on a short video embedded in the story brings motion and life. Suddenly you’re inside the Lock & Dam Eatery’s party – you watch the ribbon cutting, see the high-fives, maybe catch a snippet of the live music that played. Video “shows Hastings in action” hastingsnow.com. Even a 30-second clip of a Friday night football touchdown or a timelapse of the new riverfront sculpture going up can convey energy and context that static photos can’t. And importantly, video on HastingsNow isn’t ephemeral like a Snapchat or Instagram story – it’s saved and archived as part of the article, “preserving community moments for posterity.” hastingsnow.com In that sense, it carries forward what local TV and community film projects did, but accessible on demand to anyone.
Audio: Perhaps the most novel piece is the use of audio clips. Each HastingsNow Stiva often features an audio element – sometimes it’s a Soundbite (the 30-second voice message from someone in the story), or an AI-produced podcast summary of the article, or an interview snippet. This re-introduces the spoken word in news, which is ironically the oldest form of news there is (think of ancient storytellers or, yes, town criers). Hearing a person’s voice adds a layer of authenticity and human connection that text can struggle with hastingsnow.com. The tremor of excitement, the laughter, the local accent – it’s all there in audio. HastingsNow has leveraged this by not only streaming these clips on the site but also offering them as downloadable mini-podcasts hastingsnow.com. Neighbors can literally listen to Hastings stories while driving or walking the dog, turning idle moments into community connection time hastingsnow.com, hastingsnow.com.
By weaving together these media, a HastingsNow Stiva doesn’t just inform you – it immerses you. When you both see and hear a story, “the message truly sticks,” creating a lasting memory hastingsnow.com. Researchers call this multi-sensory integration; Ashley and Peter just call it good storytelling with soul. It’s the next step in the evolution: not replacing the old ways, but amplifying them using new technology.
Bridging Generations and Technologies
Dena and Kada talk about how they prepare to paint on the mural in downtown historic Hastings, Minnesota. Video credit: HastingsNow.com/ashley
One lovely outcome of this storytelling evolution is how it bridges generations in Hastings. Seniors who grew up reading the Gazette might find themselves drawn to HastingsNow for the thoughtful articles and rich historical pieces (many deep-dive blogs explore topics like local history, philosophy, even science – but always with a Hastings twist, appealing to lifelong learners). Meanwhile, teens and young adults, who are digital natives, get hooked by the quick-hit audio and video content – it feels natural to them like a YouTube or TikTok, but it’s their town’s content. HastingsNow cleverly caters to both: the depth of print media with the engagement of social media.
Consider the Local Deep Research series that Peter curates (in partnership with AI tools like NotebookLM). They’ve produced blog posts on topics from entropy in Hastings’ context to the origin of ideas, making big concepts accessible and linking them back to our community hastingsnow.com, hastingsnow.com. These are written, text-heavy pieces – something a retired engineer or a curious high schooler might both enjoy. On the flip side, the Local Interviews & Gallery features lean on visuals – photo galleries of community events, video interviews with local artists, etc., which provide immediate visual gratification.
And then, tying it all together, are the Soundbites and podcasts which people of any age can listen to on the go. In fact, by integrating with voice technology (you can imagine a near future where you ask Alexa or your car, “Play HastingsNow’s daily headlines” and get the latest three Soundbites read out), the platform is bringing our local storytelling full circle to something almost as convenient as a chat on the street corner.
The Role of STIVA in Shaping Our Future
Where does this evolution lead? HastingsNow is betting that the future of local media is interactive, multimedia, and community-driven. The STIVA format (Stories with Text, Images, Video, Audio) may well become a template for other towns looking to reinvigorate their local news. Hastings is somewhat of an innovator here – we’re a pilot community showing how it can be done. Already, others are watching. For instance, the owner of the town’s butcher shop (Duffs Meats) is collaborating with HastingsNow to develop a strategic STIVA project for their own storytelling needs hastingsnow.com. The new site they’ll launch in 2025 is likely to borrow from the multimedia playbook pioneered here in Hastings.
Moreover, this blending of tech and storytelling means our community memory is being recorded in richer detail than ever. Think ahead 20 years: When someone in 2045 wants to know what Hastings was like in the 2020s, they won’t just have dusty newspapers or static Facebook posts to look at. They’ll have a living archive of voices and videos – essentially time capsules with sights and sounds. The Echologue interviews (addressed in Blog 3) will let future generations hear how we reflected on our lives. The Stiva stories will let them see our events as if they were there. We are, in effect, future-proofing our local heritage through this modern storytelling.
And yet, for all the tech, the heart of it remains community spirit. HastingsNow’s evolution succeeds because it respects the fundamentals: keep it local, keep it authentic, and include everyone. It’s not about tech for tech’s sake; it’s tech in service of human connection. The printed Hastings Gazette bound us together in its day by informing and sometimes entertaining. Today, HastingsNow seeks to do the same – just on the platforms we actually use, and enriched with the media formats we now expect.
In summary, the path from town criers to Stivas in Hastings has been one of continuous innovation. Each era built on the last: oral tales became print news; print added photos; broadcast brought sound and motion; digital allowed instant sharing; and now HastingsNow converges it all. By understanding and embracing this evolution, our town is ensuring that the ways we share will never limit what we share. However you prefer to take in a story – by reading, watching, or listening – HastingsNow has you covered. It’s a beautiful synergy of old and new, and it’s writing the next chapter in Hastings’ long story of community connection.
