Multimedia is too hard to find

Posted on January 26, 2007 by Melissa Worden

Anyone else have a hard time finding multimedia on newspaper Web sites?

I try to look at several sites each week to see what my counterparts are doing. It’s hard to make the rounds every day because my work week just gets too busy. (I’m hoping this blog will help some.) Even for a multimedia editor, finding new multimedia projects becomes too confusing and time consuming — imaging what it’s like for the reader!

So I’m wondering, how do you find multimedia examples? In addition to visiting individual sites, here’s what I mainly tend to use:

Interactive Narratives (thank you Andrew for keeping up this site even though you are busier now)
Cyberjournalist
The new NPPA monthly multimedia contest winners
snd.ies, but this site can be slow in updating the winner list
And Joe Weiss, before he took a hiatus

But I think the best way to keep up on new projects may be to help judge the contests. I learned SO much the past couple of years volunteering for the ONA awards. Looks like Angela Grant gets a lot out of judging the NPPA contest. Here’s one list and another describing some of her favorites from the December entries. (Thanks so much for sharing, Angela.)

All this is nice for the judges — but what about our readers? It’s truly a shame some of these pieces are buried or fall off the sites when you go to the individual newspapers. For example, I couldn’t find “The Simpler Life” slideshow starting from the homefront on Dallas Morning News.

(The Mercury News‘ use of tagging — along the right side — is quite helpful. I like that feature a lot.)

Really, we’re doing such a disservice to the readers by letting this happen. Plus, it’s a lot of time and energy that’s wasted. After all, are we producing these for the industry or the public?

Oh, and this is definitely a case of the pot calling the kettle black. One of my goals for this year is to redesign the heraldtribune.com multimedia page so it features more content and better.

Sidenote: How do you label multimedia?

Most sites I’ve found with a specific section, label it “multimedia,” but USATODAY.com calls it “interactive media,” and a few other sites bury the packages in “special reports” sections.

The San Antonio Express-News (Angela’s paper) and the Houston Chronicle are the only sites I’ve seen so far that not only list a multimedia section on the homefront, but they also list the subsections. From a multimedia editor’s perspective, that’s very cool. Could it be a Texas thing?

Comments

7 Responses to “Multimedia is too hard to find”

Mindy McAdams on January 27th, 2007 8:43 am

You are so right about this! Even when I know the title of a package, if I put that in the search box at the news site, 9 times out of 10, it won’t come up.

I have heard that most non-journalists do not know what the word “multimedia” means on journalism Web sites. This is why The Washington Post names their main navigation “Photos & Video” instead.
John Bonnar on January 27th, 2007 9:58 am

Unfortunately, even when newspapers use ‘photos’ and ‘video’ instead of multimedia, the links are buried in a corner of the page. You really have to hunt for them.
angela on January 27th, 2007 11:39 am

This is one of my major pet peeves. And thanks for the kudos about the Express-News multimedia page, but in my opinion, it could be a lot better. Sometimes it’s a week before something finally gets listed. It’s not organized, so it’s still hard to find a specific thing.

I think multimedia should definitely have one (easily navigable) place to live on a site. I love how the Austin American-Statesman organizes it.

But a multimedia page isn’t the only place multimedia should be…It should be in every section and on every page where it’s applicable.

I don’t think the majority of viewers go to a site and think “I’m gonna look at some multimedia today.” Instead they say “I want to find out about that mulch fire in Helotes.” Then they see a link for a video inside the latest story about the Helotes fire, and they watch it. Or they think “I want a recipe for tonight.” And they see a link for a slideshow on the food page, so they watch it.
Patrick Beeson on January 27th, 2007 2:02 pm

I think this issue is greater than just multimedia. It’s the failure of newspaper Web sites to provide robust internal search engines.

We (sort of) solved this problem at roanoke.com by creating a multimedia database and integrating it into our search. Of course, our search isn’t without its problems but it does an excellent job turning up multimedia items (as long as someone manually posts them to the database).

I also agree with Angela in that multimedia shouldn’t be treated as its own element. It needs to be integrated into other content on the Web site.

A lot of this depends on how users are interacting with your site. For example, since I use RSS to get the latest stories, I will never see any multimedia unless they are inserted into the feed — ours are not — or they are embedded into the story (which is in the feed).

Other users only go to a site to find a specific thing, similar to what Angela said about the fire or recipe.

Other things to note: tags (you mentioned this), presenting content based on behaviour tracking (user x likes Tech football so we can assume that user x might enjoy a story about Tech students), and making it easier for users to “share” content with others (think YouTube).
Melissa Worden on January 27th, 2007 10:23 pm

I agree with all of the above. It’s the search function that desperately needs to be fixed before our sites can do any kind of service to our readers.

Because even when we do pair it well with the story, it doesn’t help anything if they can’t find that story, either. (A problem I have all too often, too).

Patrick, if you haven’t already seen it, check out Lucas Grindley’s blog entry about Netflixing your news. You might find that to be an interesting read — similar to what you’re describing in the last graph.
Patrick Beeson on January 28th, 2007 10:23 am

I suppose we could also call it “Amazoning your news,” since they too have a pretty sophisticated recommendation system.
richard on January 29th, 2007 12:21 pm

if you become too tired of looking at many sites to find notable multimedia from across the nation, you should check out http://www.multimediashooter.com
we try very hard to provide a link in the right hand side bar under notable multimedia to what’s out there, tnxs.
-r