Of video blogging and emerging narratives

I participated community session on blogging with colleague Carrie Rengers and Bobby Rozzell. Bobby has a great project, where he's indexed our city's blogs. I've posted the slides from my slice of the presentation, with links and videos to the multimedia approach I used with the development "Common Law" video series of our court system. The slides include various links and examples used in the presentation (my digital handout, so to speak)



Now that I've been doing this for the past year, I'm seeing an interesting trend within the vlog. We're starting to follow some cases as they progress from preliminary hearings to trials. Some defendants in previous episodes are starting to make return appearances, as they continue break the law.

These are emerging narratives within the series, reminding me of a theme in a recent post by Andrea Pitzer on the Nieman Storyboard.
In discussing developing fluid forms of digital story-telling, Pitzer says:

"It’s an interesting concept for journalists, which some storytellers have begun working on -- a kind of episodic, open-ended narrative made of individual stories that tie back into the issue at hand while providing outlets for viewers to engage on their own terms."

It's what I feel like is starting to develop with the video series. But it's taken some time. While patience isn't something journalists are known for, it certainly paying off with this project.