Over at my work blog, I've been working on this investigative report of a 30-year-old murder that has sent a man to prison for a crime he claims he didn't commit.
In the course of those posts, I've been using multimedia to tell the story, but it's produced its own particular challenges. There aren't a lot of visuals left from a crime that happened in 1981. But I did land a phone interview from prison with Ronnie Rhodes, whose case we've been looking into with students from a Kansas law school.
I wanted to produce an audio story to let people hear Rhodes speak.
Katie, our online content developer, shook her head, "no."
At least I just got the shake of the head. The online team says you're really in trouble when Katie gives you a shake of the head and roll of the eyes. The eyes didn't roll this time.
"No one listens to audio on our site," she said. I had to come up with something visual -- anything but a blank screen.
Not having much video or visuals, we decided to create a timeline of what Rhodes said happened the night of the crime. We ended up with this video.
I created the timeline using PowerPoint. I saved the slides as .jpgs, then imported them into Final Cut Express. You work with what you've got, after all.
The "video" was really the audio story I'd wanted to create with something for people to watch while they listened to it. It worked. It continued to get a number of views for weeks after I originally posted it, and the three-part series, ranked among our most-watched videos that first week. I'm still getting views on them months later.
So what do you think? Do people listen to straight audio stories on your site? What can you do to help create video with a lack of visuals?
Showing posts with label projects. Show all posts
Showing posts with label projects. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Don't wait until the end of the reporting to think multimedia
When it comes to multimedia, journalists should think out a story in an inverted pyramid. But we don’t, especially in investigative or enterprise stories.
We’re used to digging for the story over days, weeks, and months. Yes, some of have spent years on a story. We’ve got piles of documents, stacks of notebooks, and we’re ready to write. Then the online producer asks, “What else have you got?”
Too many times, multimedia and the web packages become an after thought. Unlike the normal path ofinvestigative stories, when you’re ready to write, it’s often too late to be thinking multimedia.
Mark S. Luckie, whose blog 10,000 Words provides a great resource for multimedia journalists, says investigative reporters need to think in terms of how the web can help them tell there stories.
But we have to think of them as we report the story, not at the end.
As we gather documents and notes on a story, we ought to be thinking in terms of video clips and recording audio during interviews that we could turn into multimedia later. Also, keep feeding your web producer bits that could make an interactive map or timeline.
I’m in the middle of a long-term investigative project. As with these kinds of stories, I’m not certain where it will lead. The other day, one of our interns was helping with research. She had gathered a mountain of papers. Somewhere in all that paperwork, we expect to find the story. I pulled out a video camera and shot a minute of her working with all that paper.
We may never use it, just like we don’t use a lot of the notes we take. But I’ve filed it away in a box where I will keep multimedia for the project, just in case.
Update: ProPublica has a great example of how web tools can exaplain complex information with its map on the unemployment insurance drain.
We’re used to digging for the story over days, weeks, and months. Yes, some of have spent years on a story. We’ve got piles of documents, stacks of notebooks, and we’re ready to write. Then the online producer asks, “What else have you got?”
Too many times, multimedia and the web packages become an after thought. Unlike the normal path ofinvestigative stories, when you’re ready to write, it’s often too late to be thinking multimedia.
Mark S. Luckie, whose blog 10,000 Words provides a great resource for multimedia journalists, says investigative reporters need to think in terms of how the web can help them tell there stories.
“The web serves as an all-encompassing platform for publishing interactive maps, multimedia stories built in Flash or other software, video, audio and other forms of media besides text,” Luckie wrote on The Muckraker Blog for the Center for Investigative Reporting.
But we have to think of them as we report the story, not at the end.
“The responsibility, however, requires the judgment to know which media is appropriate for a particular story. For example, interactive maps are great, but they aren't appropriate for every story,” Luckie writes.
As we gather documents and notes on a story, we ought to be thinking in terms of video clips and recording audio during interviews that we could turn into multimedia later. Also, keep feeding your web producer bits that could make an interactive map or timeline.
I’m in the middle of a long-term investigative project. As with these kinds of stories, I’m not certain where it will lead. The other day, one of our interns was helping with research. She had gathered a mountain of papers. Somewhere in all that paperwork, we expect to find the story. I pulled out a video camera and shot a minute of her working with all that paper.
We may never use it, just like we don’t use a lot of the notes we take. But I’ve filed it away in a box where I will keep multimedia for the project, just in case.
Update: ProPublica has a great example of how web tools can exaplain complex information with its map on the unemployment insurance drain.
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