Deanna Dent is a talented multimedia reporter who had been mulling a photographically intensive project on the Virgin of Guadalupe for some time before becoming a News21 fellow (she’s now a post-grad intern at the Sun Sentinel in south Florida) . The Virgin’s story is unique. What began as a purely “Latina” religious character has transcended all ethnic, national and cultural boundaries. Deanna felt the story could be best told using multiple content formats, especially since she had hundreds of images to tell different facets of the story. She also wanted to let viewers skip to any part of the story they wanted to at any time. She proposed providing only the barest form of linear structure — in the form of three main “pods” with branching “subpods.” News21 visual reporting instructor Andrew Long helped Deanna conceive of the design framework. She then worked with Web developer Britton Halle to complete the project. We have seldom seen media presented in this fashion on news Web sites.
innovation
innovationVisuals: ‘Traveling Virgin’ package explained
Monday, August 17th, 2009Approach: The Multimedia Blender
Sunday, July 26th, 2009When thinking about the terms “multimedia” and “innovation” in the context of journalism, it’s difficult to truly catch someone’s attention with a pitch, or to even have the conversation without talking about Mediastorm.
The problem lies in the notion that to be innovative is merely to have multimedia. But in this thinking, the media itself is often still compartmentalized into traditional buckets of audio, video, and photography. They are also slotted into traditional, linear storytelling as complimentary aspects to a straight-arrow narrative. Brian Storm, to his credit, gets this.