OK – the headline’s maybe a bit overblown, because not all stories are going to be told this way. Just the important ones.
I’m indebted to my mate John at the Beeb for pointing me in the direction of this multimedia op-ed piece from the New York Times, published last week. The piece, called Why Should We Care?, features Nicholas D. Kristof, a columnist for the paper, who’s obviously gone to Sudan to see the terrible plight of people in that strife-torn country, and file some reports (here’s the column he wrote to go alongside the multimedia version – reg required).
Is this an example of what the NYT is going to do with its op-ed pieces once they’re behind a paywall? If so, count me signed up. The piece is quite a simple narrative, based around Kristof’s response to a letter writer who originally posed the "Why should we care?" question. It opens with Kristof talking to camera, neatly giving the thing a sense of being live, and for proving he had actually left the comfort of his office and the US to file. But most of the piece is his voice over still photographs – the kind of thing one could easily put together in iMovie.
In fact, I’d imagine they used something better than that – watch the presentation and you’ll also spot the name of producer Naka Nathaniel, who I suspect uses more sophisticated means of production. Steve Outing profiled Nathaniel last year on Poynter – he’s a Paris-based multimedia journalist who trots around the world with some digital cameras, a Mac and "at least a half-dozen ways to connect and transmit". Nathaniel, one senses, is a forerunner of the foreign correspondent of the future.
I find all this stuff utterly fascinating – the new form of storytelling, the way it’s put together as a piece of journalism, the means of doing it, the attractiveness of the resulting package. That this is not television. And it’s all the more powerful for it.
It’s also far from quick ‘n’ dirty blogging, and a move on from podcasting.
You could draw a little 2×2, with the horizontal axis running from narrow audience (left) to broad audience (right), and the vertical axis running from low production values (bottom) to high production values (top).
Blog posts sit bottom left, TV reports sit top right. The multimedia report above is moving towards a new territory of bottom right – more expensive and specialist. That’s not a value judgement, but it’s an interesting indicator of a new path being forged.
Hmm… expensive and specialist doesn’t strike me as a recipe for success in these cost-conscious times!
But I wonder if this kind of report has more in common with the low end than is immediately apparent? I’m not arguing that this is close to blogging, even podcasting, although I think it’s a big brother of the latter and the more talented cousin of the former. The shared gene among all, however, is dramatically lowered costs of production and, thus, cost of entry, for amateurs and previously uninterested businesses alike.
Given the time (perhaps the principle cost here), someone with quite modest skills could produce this report on a camcorder and decent laptop. The mass market production values aren’t hard – or expensive – to mimic now.
So I’d argue this kind of thing actually lies somewhere more to the middle of your matrix which, in itself, is quite new ground being broken.
Yes, that’s all fair. I’m not sure I really bought into my own “lower right” theory, but I was too attracted to the idea of radical new ground being broken – as opposed to your (much more reasonable) suggestion of a bit of new ground being broken. Also I was far too interested in the analysis than the thing being analysed.
Certainly it’s not as expensive as TV production. I’d be interested to see how this pans out compared to, say, the production of multimedia CDs. (Don’t see many of those these days.) The skills are quite specialist, at least in so far as it takes more than one person to put together a multimedia piece.
On a related note, I wonder how scaleable this approach will be. It takes a lot of work to create a respectable website. But once you’ve got the basic template you keep sticking in more content, and you get more value out. Not so (as far as I can see) with this kind of thing, where you need to create new graphics for each new piece. (Unless there’s a nice Flash-oriented CMS in the wings.)
Still, I hope it all goes well. If only because that means more jobs for us all.
Thanks for the link. This looks like an interesting format to work in. I’d certainly like to know how to produce this kind of content, and to have a go experimenting with it. I looked around their site and found a few more examples. For me, the most intriguing (because of the interactive potential) was Six Questions for Iran, which you should be able to see here:
http://www.nytimes.com/package.....ATURE.html
Multimedia editorial
The New York Times has been doing some interesting work in multimedia journalism. Is this the future of online editorial presentation? I would mind having a go!
Thanks for pointing to this, Neil.
They’ve been doing interesting things for a while. This about Oregan’s suicide option is much more powerful for hearing the voices of those who want to die: http://www.nytimes.com/package.....ATURE.html
Also the interactive obits (paid notices) here feel both dignified and relevant for a newspaper:
http://www.spokesmanreview.com...../cover.asp
(I’m giving a talk at the National Obituary Association Conference in a few weeks, can you tell?)
Well, I said I wanted to find out more about how to do this, so did some looking around. Mindy McAdams seems to be an expert (http://mindymcadams.com/) and has just published a new book on Flash journalism. The book has an accompanying site, which links throught to tips, examples, case studies etc:
http://flashjournalism.com/
Thanks for the plug, Neil. You can see lots more great examples of Flash journalism here:
http://interactivenarratives.org/