Who will be hearing my story and how do they like a story to be told? What do they love? What do they fear?

In an op-ed piece in the New York Times called App-omattox: The Civil War Goes Virtual, Virginia Heffernan gives her thoughts on a new take on the classic recurring story of our Civil War (classic, as she points out, in that it comes up again and again as a fascinating piece of our history). Civil War Today, an app from the History Channel, combines a very old form of storytelling with very modern delivery methods—newspaper-like information delivered straight to your iPad, each day occurring in realtime over the course of the war’s 4-year history. Much like the film High Noon where you can watch the clocks in the background ticking towards the story’s climax, one day on the app corresponds to one day in the war.

The concept is a clever one—people are addicted to their iPads, and one of the largest categories of apps is news readers. Why not deliver the story of the Civil War in a way that meets everyone else’s behavior rather than demanding they change their behavior to meet us?

In the 1990s former Disney CEO Michael Eisner had this same idea. A history buff, Eisner wanted to combine the past of the United States with the kind of storytelling that made his company famous, and so set out to create Disney’s America, a theme park that would entertain and educate at the same time. The park, to be located on Virginia’s hallowed grounds of history, would tell America’s story in an immersive Disney environment (for the full history of this park, read SamLand’s Disney Adventures fantastic 5-part series that will give you all the ins and eventual outs). The idea died before it took a breath.

Residents of the area where the park would be built were appalled. While the people at Disney strive to please their audience, they did not fully anticipate the passionate backlash as the audience for this park was multilayered, coming like waves of widely differing interests and intensity. Disney knows how to make a success, so we can assume that their proposed park would have attracted guests, but the future of the past was in the hands of an entirely different audience, one that had to give its approval before the masses ever set foot in the proposed version of America, and Disney managed to tweak their loves and fears in one swipe. The educated and wealthy protectors of history declared everything about the corporate intrusion, even down to the name Disney’s America, an insult and used their powerful influence to kill the concept all together. One reason why ideas fail to gain approval in business is a failure to deliver the initial story properly.

Disney speaks the language of the masses, but forgot to speak the language of historians. Consider this Christopher Hitchens article from Slate about the British monarchy, in which the author, when writing about Princess Margaret, says, “She also produced some extra royal children, for whom something to do had to be found.” This little aside lands in the middle of a steady stream of amazing grammatical trickery, befitting both the subject matter and, most importantly, Slate’s educated audience who would appreciate such verbal goofery.

Disney’s sales pitch came in brush strokes and pixie dust when it should have come in cross references and footnotes. Historians don’t do magic. Just as Jeffrey Katzenberg said that he owned animation and no one was going to take it from him when he felt intrusion from Steve Jobs, history professors and writers were not about to stand idly by to watch Michael Eisner stomp on their precious past. Considering the audience, the message needed to be framed in an entirely different way.

Back to the History Channel’s new Civil War app…

Can a concept like this succeed? What is the story they are telling, and are they telling it the right way? If people have already paid the $8, then yes, it already has. Of course, the true believers behind the app who will secrete the Civil War from their pores for the next four years to keep the experience alive have much more in mind than the the app’s upfront earnings. The endorsement in the New York Times is certainly a bonus as a great way to build awareness, but it puts into stark contrast the story they are trying to tell with the way we like our stories to be told.

The headline of the New York Times piece, App-omattox: The Civil War Goes Virtual, is hilarious in that ’2 a.m. and so tired that everything is funny’ kind of way, but it speaks to how we take on information, particularly in the context of the delivery method. I’ve recently found myself beginning conversations, “Oh by the way, did you see that xxx happened today?” When the person I’m speaking to asks for more information, I realize I have none to offer because the extent of my knowledge (again, on a subject that I brought up) ends at the headline I happened to notice earlier in the day when blazing through my news apps. No, I haven’t read the story, not even the first few paragraphs, only the headline. Like the Bing advertisements where people go off on random tangents because they have taken in too much superficial search engine randomness, a seemingly innocent comment triggers an entirely random bit of recall, and before I realize what is happening, my brain begins to yield google-esque search results with even less depth than the results page.

Clearly, when taking in information, we skim. Four years to tell a story is a really…really…long…time. My favorite app last week, Zite, is not my favorite app this week, and an app that I checked religiously every day several months ago, The Guardian Eyewitness, is nearly forgotten. In the world of digital intake, everything must be tailored to me, even time itself. History today is a package happening all at once. The app delivers the story of the Civil War in a great way, but may require a little too much legwork to get to the payoff.

Still, the concept is very good, particularly if The History Channel realizes that this is not THE way to tell the story of the Civil War, but rather A way to tell the story of the Civil War. The success will depend on how seriously they take their transition to an emphasis on History while ditching the Channel. Is this a story for history buffs? Academics? Skimmers? People with iTunes gift cards? To truly tell a complete story, we must consider the audience, and if the audience is as broad as everyone that means we can’t rely on telling a story in a new way, we must tell it in every way.