Feature: Words, Images and Sounds

Multimedia components enhance journalists’ abilities to present compelling stories online

By LaShell Stratton

First Published: February 2008

If the Internet is the ray of light that will help to guide newspapers into the future, digital storytelling is the prism that refracts that light. Text, audio, video, slideshows and even databases are all part of the digital storytelling spectrum. Newspapers can use these components in different ways depending on the available staff, software and hardware, and the desired goal.

Some take a simple approach to digital storytelling and patch together the pieces, adding videos to blogs or slideshows to articles. Nora Paul, director of the Institute for New Media Studies at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, calls this approach multiple media—a quilt of words, images and sounds. In contrast, multimedia is a tapestry of words, images and sound that are woven together. An example of multimedia would be a slideshow with audio overlay.

Whatever the technique, newspapers should look for ways to “take advantage of the new story format and not just replicate what’s been done in the past,” says Paul, who co-authored the online guide, “The Elements of Digital Storytelling” (www.inms.umn.edu/elements).

Some newspaper Web sites, such as washingtonpost.com, have embraced complex multimedia presentations. The site produces about seven “major blowout” multimedia projects annually, says Executive Editor Jim Brady.

In June 2006, The Washington Post and washingtonpost.com debuted “Being a Black Man,” (www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/metro/interactives/blackmen/blackmen.html), a series that ran in print until January 2007 and was simultaneously updated on the Web. It explored what it means to be a black man in America, focusing on issues such as black men in prison, the importance of marriage in the black community and what it means to be a gay black man. It included long A-section articles in the newspaper and Flash multimedia presentations online with slideshows, high-definition videos, audio and interactive features.

The newspaper began planning the series in late 2005 and held monthly meetings with reporters, editors, designers and photographers to discuss the story’s progress. There also were weekly, informal meetings with smaller subsets of the project team, depending on the questions that arose during ongoing coverage efforts and planning. The project took six months of work before the launch.

“It turned out to be a pretty powerful piece in the end,” says Tom Kennedy, managing editor for multimedia at Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive.

To produce such strong multimedia presentations, Kennedy says, newspapers need to buy better software and equipment, and hire more multimedia journalists (see story, below). Kennedy supervises 15 full-time and four part-time “visual journalists,” some of whom contributed to the series.

Keeping It Simple
In contrast, the Times Union in Albany, N.Y., uses digital storytelling mainly to compete with local broadcast stations in covering late-breaking news rather than to produce provocative, complex multimedia pieces.

“Our audience just isn’t there right now,” says Vice President and Editor Rex Smith.  The newspaper’s Web site, timesunion.com, has tried in the past five years to do projects with video, audio and photo galleries such as “Fourth World, Our World,” (http://timesunion.com/fourthworld/), which focused on the AIDS crisis and famine in Malawi, Africa (the paper even sent a reporter and photographer to the tiny southeastern African nation to explore the humanitarian crisis there); and “Central Avenue: Broken Dreams, Second Chances,” (http://timesunion.com/specialreports/centralave/), which documented the decline of one of Albany’s busiest commercial strips.

While these projects provide compelling journalism, Smith says, they don’t grab Web site visitors’ attention. Statistics show more visitor traffic for short “YouTube quality videos” that are 45 seconds in length and have a hard or soft news focus, he says.

Multimedia presentations “require such an enormous amount of sacrifice from our other journalistic capabilities that we just don’t see it as necessary right now,” Smith says. For that reason, he adds, timesunion.com is “aiming low” for the next 12 to 18 months, continuing to use blogs, short videos, slideshows and photo galleries either as stand-alones or with stories online because they are what the audience wants.

Taking the First Steps
Whether a newspaper takes a multiple media or a multimedia approach to digital storytelling, industry experts agree that success begins with collaboration between online and print. For instance, at dallasnews.com the multimedia division discusses with print reporters and editors at The Dallas Morning News realistic time frames for a project’s completion. They also review the different media that may be available (video, audio or photos), says April Kinser, a multimedia journalist at dallasnews.com. For bigger presentations, the multimedia journalists even share storyboards with reporters and solicit feedback.

The pieces that lend themselves to multimedia presentations are dynamic or important topics such as sports and national stories, says Washingtonpost.com’s Brady. “Ask yourself questions like, ‘Is the subject good on camera?’” Multimedia journalists don’t have to think like broadcasters, says Brady, but “its always good to have people with broadcasting sensibilities around.”

Many newspapers also train staffers in the proper use of multimedia hardware and software, and appropriate storytelling techniques (see story, p. 32). Some newspapers conduct their training in-house.

Regina McCombs, senior producer for multimedia at StarTribune.com, has been informally training staffers for 10 years. In fall 2007, she and Multimedia Producer Jenni Pinkley began formally training photographers to create videos. The three-month course includes a few days of in-house training on how to use their gear and lots of hands-on training in the field. The photographers do biweekly check-ins that include group critiques and whether presentations worked well, and if not, why. Other newspapers send staffers to universities or training institutes.

Purposeful Storytelling
Once the groundwork has been laid, newspaper staffers should establish a goal for each multimedia piece to help determine the right technique and media to employ, Paul says.

“Animated infographics are wonderful ways you can step through the stages of how an event unfolded or show how something works,” says Paul, who with colleague Kathleen A. Hansen received a $250,000 grant last year from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation (www.knightfdn.org) to create and test a news simulation environment that allows citizens to have virtual encounters with a news reporter and key players in a news event to help them better understand the news. “The ‘you are there’ presentation with panoramic photos can put readers inside a space” and help convey an experience, she says.

Every media element should be part of the presentation for a reason and make sense within the context of the piece, says Charlotte-Anne Lucas, a visiting lecturer at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who teaches digital storytelling. A year ago Lucas was content director of MySanAntonio.com. “Don’t use pictures for picture’s sake or audio for audio’s sake,” she says.

For example, Lucas recalls, when a reporter from MySanAntonio.com covered the election of Pope Benedict XVI in 2005, she “came back with this beautiful audio of the bells of St. Peter’s Square ringing and people chanting, ‘Papa, Papa.’ It just set the tone for the piece and helped transport you to this wonderful, magical place.”

After the multimedia story premieres, the audience is the final judge of whether it worked well. “You just have to put it up and see if people like it,” Brady says. “You can track how many people are going to the page. If it doesn’t work, just take it down.”

For newspapers, digital storytelling requires experimentation, Brady adds, “and not having a fear of failure.”