MNPW: Why multimedia?
Posted on August 17, 2007 by Melissa Worden
Nora Paul, director of the Institute for New Media Studies at the University of Minnesota, kicked off the Multimedia News Producers Workshop by talking about why exactly we publish multimedia.
Here are some of my notes from her presentation:
“Multimedia storytelling is another way to build understanding between neighbors at a time when we often notice our differences more than our similarities — Sunnyvale, CA City Council minutes“
So why do we create multimedia?
Well, there’s a few reasons why we’re doing it right now:
>> More people than ever have access to broadband
>> YouTube has made video sharing possible
>> Sites such as Blinkx are going YouTube in their video sharing
>> Evidence shows that the audience wants it, so therefore, rich media has become part of the business model.
But that doesn’t mean we haven’t had or aren’t still encountering hurdles:
>> Newspapers loathe to support R&D. Only in the late ’90s was attention paid to how we can recraft our product
>> DotCom bust also burst the excitement around multimedia
>> Because newspapers operate as an assembly line, it’s been difficult to create a multimedia production environment (a better model is the TV newsroom — all positions work on the newscast — get better explainer on this!)
>> Newsroom culture is so difficult to change. Studies show that the newsroom is like the military and healthcare. All are like triage operations and very difficult to introduce change.
>> The lack of training in news skills (this is a benefit of multimedia — more training and more money is being spent now)
What is multimedia?
This is difficult to answer because it’s hard to define. The range of multimedia terms is so indistinct. For example:
>>TV has defined pieces, ie., b-roll, nat sounds, feed, voice over
>>Print has defined pieces, ie., headline, column, byline, cutline
>> Online, not so much. One may call it interactive, another non-linear, another multimedia. These aren’t commonly defined terms.
The elements of digital storymaking, a project by the Institute for New Media, tries to define multimedia by creating a taxonomy, analyzing projects and measuring the effects digital stories have on users. You can view a .pdf with more information here.
Definitions are so important
Newsrooms are finally paying attention to multimedia — but if we don’t have a clear, shared definition of multimedia, we won’t know when we’ve hit on an answer: Is it to drive traffic, inform our communities, do kick-ass interactives to win contests? What is the point of the game?
Not until we’re clear on this definition will we know who/how many we need, what are the rules, how will we know when/if we’ve won?
Here’s how Paul categorizes what’s being done now with multimedia:
>> How is it displayed? Are all the pieces thrown on the page? (Paul calls this ghetto-ized)
>> Multiple-media vs. multimedia Paul defines mutliple-media as story-level ghetto-ization — ie, sptimes.com’s Wetlands special report, whereas multimedia has parts woven together where if you take one piece out, it unravels — ie, washingtonpost.com’s The Women of Kabul
>> The display is the thing (ie, Kansas.com’s On Gossamer Wings)
Paul closed her presentation telling us about how a photographer with still, video, audio skills takes his still and video camera with him out in the field. He defines his position outside the profession as a photographer; inside the profession as a multimedia news producer.
That gave me goosebumps. For years I’ve defended my job as an online producer/editor as being a journalist, too. Now they are defining their jobs with my title. Love it.
Tags: multimedia, training
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