Fundamentals of Multimedia Storytelling
How are media organizations taking advantage of the web’s immediacy, flexibility, capacity, permanence, and interactivity to create an altogether new type of narrative experience?
Immediacy – Stories can be posted in near real time and they can be told in greater context.
Flexibility – Stories can be told using words, images, audio, video, graphics, and animation, depending on the which does the job best.
Capacity – There are none of the traditional limits of space (print) or time (radio and television). There are also fewer cost barriers, opening the door for more independent content producers to create original content.
Permanence – Ongoing stories can be presented in their entirety as the Web offers vast archival options.
Interactivity – Journalists interact directly with the audience, feedback is immediate through comments, forums, chats. Increasingly online audiences are contributing directly to the story in the form of user-generated content.
Live Event Coverage – As it Happens
In times of rapidly developing news, many organizations are turning to use a “live blog” format, where they combine all media from their reporters, along with social media sources. Often news “breaks” on Twitter and other social media platforms
Traditional news outlets have made dramatic changes to their formats and delivery of breaking news, as in the example of natural and man-made emergencies. Online outlets use eyewitness accounts and provide in-depth context for unfolding stories.
Some of the first big stories to break on Twitter: the crash of US Airways flight 1549
January 15, 2009 – Hudson River crash-landing photo sent with Twitter.
May 1, 2011 – Rumors of Osama bin Laden’s death hit Twitter before President Obama makes the official announcement.
First, Pakistani Shohaib Athar, who was awoken by the sound of a helicopter above his house, tweeted about it, unknowingly breaking the news of the US raid on the compound in Abbottabad.
Keith Urbahn, a former aide to Donald Rumsfeld, tweeted this at 10:24 p.m.
Followed by a tweet from President Obama, at 11:30 p.m.
Interactive, Immersive Multimedia
Special reports, documentaries, and experimental sites are exploring new technique to tell stories by combining media in innovative ways.
This long-form narrative about a Cascades avalanche won a Pulitzer for feature writing. It also featured some very creative uses of video and animation. The piece was created using tools/libraries that include jQuery, underscore, jPlayer, HTML5 video, jQuery Reel, and jQuery address.
This feature explores the mysterious and heartbreaking death of Song Yang, a 38-year-old Chinese sex worker on 40th Road.
Cracking the mystery of egg shape
This multimedia documentary about an old mining town that went belly up features many creative video clips, mixed with a range of other media: photos, graphics, and animations. The National Film Board of Canada is an excellent place to find innovative interactive
Da Da Net
Photos
Photography plays a critical role in online storytelling and is no longer just the realm of photojournalists.
Syria’s Paradox: Why the War Only Ever Seems to Get Worse
Along Russia’s ‘Road of Bones,’ Relics of Suffering and Despair
NYT: The Candy Issue
Winners of Close-Up Photographer of the Year
“(The waves of asylum-seekers) worry Europe much, much more than the issue of Greece and the stability of the euro.” — German Chancellor Angela Merkel
Omran Daqneesh, 5, sits alone in the back of the ambulance after getting injured during an air strike targeted the Qaterji neighborhood of Aleppo, Syria, on Aug.17.
Secret Charms and 7th Sons: ‘The Cure’ Is Alive and Well in Ireland
The South Korean Chefs Redefining the Art of Pastry
Most of the World’s Vaccines Likely Won’t Prevent Infection From Omicron
Reporters Notebook: Traveling in Europe’s River of Migrants
Refugees ride the train in Macedonia that takes them from the southern border with Greece to the northern border with Serbia.
Westminster Dog Show Pictures: In the Tent at Lyndhurst
Everything about this year’s competition was a little unusual, including the setting, the timing and the winner. But that made the whole event feel special
Along Afghanistan’s ‘highway of death,’ the bombs are gone but suffering has deepened
A Blind 78-Year-Old Magician Finds a New Stage: New York’s Subways
The Ocean’s Biggest Garbage Pile Is Full of Floating Life
Researchers found that small sea creatures exist in equal number with pieces of plastic in parts of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which could have implications for cleaning up ocean pollution.
Watch the birdie: framing our feathered friends – in pictures
From wild parrots in the streets of Tokyo to charismatic pigeons and locked-down penguins, Gemma Padley invites us to look anew at life in the air by bringing together the world’s best bird photography
Panoramic, 3-D
Millions of Americans can trace their ancestry back to tenements like this one.
CNN Gigapixel
Augmented Reality: David Bowie in Three Dimensions
Take a Tour of Lady Liberty’s Torch (Right This Second)
Animated
There have been an explosion of animated GIFs and super-short mp4s.
To Beat the Coronavirus, Build a Better Fence
Masks Work. Really. We’ll Show You How
London’s Saatchi Gallery teamed up with Google+ for the The Motion Photography Prize, the world’s first competition for artists working with animated GIFs. The winning entry, shown here, was by Brooklyn artist Christina Rinaldi.
These served as the opening animation for a NYTimes story.
Scrolling
Magnifying glass
Menaced by Mold | A Leaky System
Illustration
The 2022 High School Yearbook of American Politics
Sketch Guy: Personal Finance on a Napkin
In this series of back-of-the-napkin drawings and posts, Carl Richards, a financial planner, explains the basics of money through simple graphs and diagrams.
This is an innovative take on the action-packed journey to the 2012 election done in graphic novel form.
NYTimes en Espanol – Me vetaron en Venezuela por reportar su realidad
Audio
We will focus on unique digital uses of audio, rather than traditional radio reporting, using audio snippets, raw audio, interactive tools.
Three Weeks Inside a Pro-Trump QAnon Chat Room
5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Sopranos
Listen to the soaring voices of Maria Callas, Jessye Norman, Leontyne Price, Renée Fleming and others
Why Do We Love TikTok Audio Memes? Call It ‘Brainfeel.’
Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony from the Jan. 6 hearing
Q&A
Raw – ATC recordings
Flight 1549 – “We’re going to be in the Hudson.”
Some audio is so compelling, shocking, or unique as in the case of eyewitness testimony, 9-11 calls, and cockpit recordings that it can really place listeners at the scene.
Interactive audio
Touchstones is an interactive series in which New Yorker writers deconstruct groundbreaking works of art and culture. The format blends personal essay and cultural history. In this first installment, three music writers look back at the albums that shaped them as critics, and as people, in their formative years.
Podcasts
Video
Full-screen, modular vignettes, interactive, collaborative, crowd-sourced, user-generated, live, raw, streamed, annotated, 360 and geolocated
After breaking the NSA surveillance story, The Guardian produced an in-depth multimedia piece.
Phone, GoPro, Animation
Short, Under 60 seconds
How to Catch a Polar Bear
The Chain of Failures That Left 17 Dead in a Bronx Apartment Fire
A Times investigation shows how a New York City high-rise became a deadly chimney of smoke.
Full-screen
“Luge is often the fastest event in the Olympics — so fast that track designers for Sochi tried to slow it down.” — NYTimes.com
Drone Footage
Drone Footage Shows Wuhan Under Lockdown
Super-short/Animations
How a Visual Language Evolves as Our World Does
In this feature about the challenges of signing science terminology, 5-10 second video clips of an ASL interpreter accompany a longer 3-minute piece.
The Coming California Megastorm
Interactive
These videos are “interactive” in the sense that the user has control or is a character in the story or decides the course of events.
Lie After Lie: Listen to How Trump Built His Alternate Reality
Can You Make It in the Gig Economy
Mixed Media
Time-Lapse
Barcelona GO! from Rob Whitworth on Vimeo.
Geo-tagged
A Bear’s Eye View of Yellowstone
In this scrolling multimedia piece, short looped videos activate automatically when the viewer scrolls past. The 30-60 second clips are mixed in with still photography and geotagged to the map running alongside it.
360 Video
Fight for Fallujah
Seeking Pluto’s Frigid Heart
Social video
Interactive Graphics, Data Visualization
“Static visualizations have long been used to support storytelling, usually in the form of diagrams and charts embedded in a larger body of text. In this format, the text conveys the story, and the image typically provides supporting evidence or related details. An emerging class of visualizations attempts to combine narratives with interactive graphics. Storytellers, especially online journalists, are increasingly integrating complex visualizations into their narratives.”— Narrative Visualization: Telling Stories with Data
Online data visualizations include interactive infographics, maps and timelines. They are used to illustrate stories in geographical space and over time. Often, interactive infographics explain very complicated concepts in a very compact amount of space.
How Do We Fix the Scandal That Is American Health Care?
Why So Many Children of Immigrants Rise to the Top
Using the data set, Professor Abramitzky and Professor Boustan were able to compare the income trajectories of immigrants’ children with those of people whose parents were born in the United States. The economists found that on average, the children of immigrants were exceptionally good at moving up the economic ladder.
WSJ: Fines for Unruly Passengers
The most unusual job market in modern American history, explained
Pandemic Aid Programs Spur a Record Drop in Poverty
NYC Bus Drivers in Line of Fire as Some Riders Flout Mask Rules
What Data Shows About Vaccine Supply and Demand in the Most Vulnerable Places
How the Economy Is Actually Doing, in 9 Charts
How the Supply Chain Crisis Unfolded
Five years. 72,677 documents. Every local police department in N.J. We built the most comprehensive statewide database of police use of force in the U.S.
State dinners of the presidents visualized.
Queen Elizabeth II: A visual timeline of her 70 years on the throne
Public opinion of OWS
The Language of the State of the Union
“An interactive chart reveals how the words presidents use reflect the twists and turns of American history.” – Atlantic Monthly
That Dinner Tab Has Soared. Here Are All the Reasons.
The Rise of the Worker Productivity Score
Across industries and incomes, more employees are being tracked, recorded and ranked. What is gained, companies say, is efficiency and accountability. What is lost?
Workers’ Comp Benefits: How Much is a Limb Worth?
“If you suffer a permanent injury on the job, you’re typically entitled to compensation for the damage to your body and your future lost wages. But depending on the state, benefits for the same body part can differ dramatically.”
Interactive Tools
The Best and Worst Places to Grow Up: How Your Area Compares
“Children who grow up in some places go on to earn much more than they would if they grew up elsewhere.” — NYTimes.com
“The choice between buying a home and renting one is among the biggest financial decisions that many adults make. But the costs of buying are more varied and complicated than for renting, making it hard to tell which is a better deal. To help you answer this question, our calculator takes the most important costs associated with buying a house and computes the equivalent monthly rent.” — NYTimes.com
Gimme Props was an interactive quiz to help voters learn, and make decisions, about the many propositions on the California ballot.
Datamining
It is often said that ‘information wants to be free,’ but it is even truer in the digital age that information wants to be analyzed, shared, synthesized, curated, aggregated, commented on and distributed. — Journalism Next, Mark Briggs
The Internet and social networks have opened up countless new ways for journalists to take the pulse of the nation and world. While aiming to avoid invasions of privacy, content on sites such as Facebook, Twitter and even Craigslist can be used to tell stories.
Top World Cup Players on Facebook Day to Day
Dissecting Elon Musk’s Tweets: Memes, Rants, Private Parts and Echo Chamber
The 258 People, Places and Things Donald Trump Has Insulted on Twitter: A Complete List
Gizmodo: Almost None of the Women in the Ashley Madison Database Ever Used the Site
“What I discovered was that the world of Ashley Madison was a far more dystopian place than anyone had realized. It isn’t even a sadscape of 31 million men competing to attract those 5.5 million women in the database. Instead, it’s like a science fictional future where every woman on Earth is dead, and some Dilbert-like engineer has replaced them with badly-designed robots.” — Annalee Newitz
Mapping Stories
Trump vs. Biden: Who’s Winning the Money Race in Your ZIP Code?
Where American Men Aren’t Working
“It’s vastly more common today than it was decades ago for prime-age men not to be working. Across the country, 16 percent of such men are not working, be they officially unemployed or outside of the labor force — disabled, discouraged, retired, in school or taking care of family. That number has more than tripled since 1968.” — NYTimes.com
“America is being watched from above. Government surveillance planes routinely circle over most major cities — but usually take the weekends off.”
“In 50 years, most of southeastern Louisiana not protected by levees will be part of the Gulf of Mexico. The state is losing a football field of land every 48 minutes — 16 square miles a year — due to climate change, drilling and dredging for oil and gas, and levees on the Mississippi River. At risk: Nearly all of the nation’s offshore oil and gas production, much of its seafood production, and millions of homes.” — ProPublica
A Rogue State Along Two Rivers
“The militant group called the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, seemed to surprise many American and Iraqi officials with the recent gains it made in its violent campaign to create a new religious state. But the rapid-fire victories achieved over a few weeks in June were built on months of maneuvering along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.”
Quizzes, Polls, Games
Quiz: Can You Tell a ‘Trump’ Fridge From a ‘Biden’ Fridge?
Inside the Delirious Rise of ‘Superfake’ Handbags
Can You Answer These Sex Ed Questions? A Post-Roe Quiz
Are You Even Fun? A Mostly Unscientific Quiz.
Do you live on the edge of chaos, or is quietly people watching your idea of a good time? Are you doing it for the gram or for the actual fun of it?
Architecture, in Abstract: Quiz No. 2
What do you call a person who moves to another country in search of a better life?
Charlie Sheen v Muammar Gaddafi: whose line is it anyway?
The US actor and the Libyan leader have produced some choice lines recently. Can you distinguish between them?
Which Terrifying Political Voice Said It?
Executioners vs. Veterinarians
“The Marshall Project compared two ways this country legally dispenses death: the execution of death-row prisoners and the euthanizing of incurably sick dogs and cats. See if you can guess which rules apply to which category of condemned creature.” — The Marshall Project
TrumpInsulter
Feeling left out that Trump hasn’t gotten around to insulting you or your friends? Here’s an app for that. Built on the real-live insults taken from the would-be President’s Twitter feed, @RealDonaldTrump, the generator below provides a Trump insult for everyone.
Collaborative: Crowd-sourcing & User-generated Content
Some of the most popular sites on the web today are those built by user-generated content: Wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr, Yelp, Vimeo, Instagram, SoundCloud, Pinterest. User-generated content means that some portion of the media is created by the user/viewer/reader.
The internet and cell phone users have turned news into a social experience. In this new multi-platform media environment, people’s relationship to news is becoming portable, personalized, and participatory.
Increasing numbers of internet users contribute to the creation of news, commented about it, or disseminated it via postings on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter.
News organizations are utilizing content from users for a wide range of purposes:
– To document a live or breaking news event, “eye-witness” or opinion
– To search for sources of information, story subjects or ideas
– To provide coverage from distinct perspectives
– To connect families during times of emergencies
– To take the pulse of the general public on a topic
Even in noisy New York, pockets of peace exist. The NYT asked readers to submit their favorite quiet spots in the noisy city.
Political Ads
Interactive Documents
William Shakespeare, Playwright and Poet, Is Dead at 52
What might President Obama’s 2015 State Of The Union address mean for California?
Buying Influence: How China Manipulates Facebook and Twitter
20 key findings about CIA interrogations
“Almost 13 years after the CIA established secret prisons to hold and interrogate detainees, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report on the CIA’s programs listing 20 key findings.” — Washington Post
AI
Multiplatform
News Apps
News 360
HTML/CSS
– HTML to define the content of web pages
– CSS to specify the style and layout of web pages
– JavaScript to program the behavior of web pages
Design Principles
From rainforest to your cupboard: the real story of palm oil
“You wash with it, you brush with it, you toast it, it’s in 50% of what you buy – but what’s the real story of palm oil? ” — Guardian
100 Most Jewish Foods
I saw my city die
A Special Report by the International Committee of the Red Cross on Homs.
