It all comes down to journalism, part 2

Posted on February 18, 2007 by Melissa Worden

In his latest post “A desperate plea,” Richard Hernandez is calling for photojournalists to “shake things up” after he reviewed what he thinks is a disappointing batch of NPPA multimedia entries this month:

“I was shocked at how we, yes, me too, have become so lazy with our storytelling. All we seem to be doing is TELLING, not showing!”

He goes on to say:

“Let’s grab this opportunity to be risky and take chances. My desperate plea to all of us is to experiment. So what if we fail. Now is the time to fail. We have the power right now to show the industry how we want to tell stories. And we better hurry. So what if we fail, then we can go back to the well traveled path. Don’t wait for the ‘glass office’ folks to give you a mandate on how things should be done. Do things the way you think they should be done and SHOW them that people are watching and appreciating the work, because believe me, if you can SHOW people great stories, they keep coming back for more.”

It’s an excellent post obviously derived from a clear passion for the industry. And by looking at the comments generated, others feel the same.

I agree, too. I brought up a similar point last week, and I think some of us are starting to feel frustrated that it’s taken a while to get to our ideal. Nearly all of us struggle with resources, technology, experience or a combination of all three holding us back. We’ve been treading water for many years with spurts of greatness and a whole lot of potential.

Roger Richards hit the nail on the head with this comment:

I believe the limiting factor for most of us right now are the lack of resources and time being allocated to visual and interactive storytelling by newspaper publishers. Some are beginning to ‘get it’, but most clearly do not.

And Hernandez is right: The “glass office” folks are taking notice of online video. Now is the time to play — and fail. I hope shooters and multimedia producers take his challenge to push their creative boundaries.

But I also agree with Zach Wise and Seth Gitner who commented on Richard’s post: At the same time, we need to be challenging ourselves in non-linear storytelling. THIS is where Web video can blow past TV video in both presentation and value.

As we continue to develop audio, video, google maps and databases and ~~then~~ figure out how to best interweave them into a story (here’s an example of what I’m talking about.) I truly think we’re sitting on the tipping point where soon we’ll be able to look back and see how far we’ve come in creating multimedia.