Rarely are video, text, still photos, audio and graphics integrated into the same story. The video is usually the same version that appears on television. The text is often augmented with photos, as it would be in a newspaper or magazine. But the main stories on these sites are often linear and produced in either text or video or audio to stand alone. Sites such as CNN, the Washington Post, NPR and are multimedia sites. Here are some examples of how news organizations have wrapped stories in the different layers of shells: And those issue/beat shells are wrapped in a general shell – usually a home page with its navigational menus – that defines what a journalism organization stakes out as its territory. The information in each shell gives the reader a sense of the context of a story and where it fits in with other stories on the same topic.Įach story shell, in turn, is part of a broader issue or beat shell at a news site that defines the more general context for each story – politics, foreign policy, education, crime, etc. This could include everything from databases, timelines and infoboxes to lists of related stories, links to other resources and online forums. When news organizations take full advantage of two other important characteristics of storytelling on the Web - context and continuity - multimedia stories are wrapped in a story “shell” that provides background information on the story. The key is using the media form – video, audio, photos, text, animation – that will present a segment of a story in the most compelling and informative way. Not redundant means that rather than having a text version of a story accompanied by a video clip that essentially tells the same story, different parts of a story are told using different media. Nonlinear means that rather than reading a rigidly structured single narrative, the user chooses how to navigate through the elements of a story. To learn more about multimedia storytelling and get hands-on practice with creating video, photos, data visualizations and more, consider attending one of our workshops.Ī multimedia story is some combination of text, still photographs, video clips, audio, graphics and interactivity presented on a Web site in a nonlinear format in which the information in each medium is complementary, not redundant.
Most multimedia stories require that the reporter go into the field to report the story face-to-face with sources, rather than doing a story entirely by telephone. They include action for video, a process that can be illustrated with a graphic (e.g., “how tornadoes form” or “how this new surgery works”), someone who can give some pithy quotes for video or audio, and/or strong emotions for still photos and audio.
The best multimedia stories are multi-dimensional. Not all stories make good multimedia stories.
0 kommentar(er)
