Online multimedia production has for a few years now come with the guidance to ‘chunk’ content: instead of producing linear content, as you would for a space in a linear broadcast schedule, you split your content into specific chunks of material that each tackles a different aspect of the issue or story being covered. Interfaces like these show the idea in practice best:

The concept is particularly well explained by Mindy McAdams (on text), and Andy Dickinson (on video, below):

“[T]ake an existing package and break it in to its key parts. Write a description of each chunk on to a card or post-it note. Lay them out in a line and then for each card add another for content you didn’t use at that point or expands on the content.

“Then try moving the content around in to sections that fit together. Pretty soon you will have the bare bones of a possible multimedia package.

Talking with some students recently about their own multimedia projects, however, I realised a weakness with the approach: we tend to assume that everyone comes to the story through the same interface.

And this is wrong.

While the practice of chunking multimedia was becoming semi-conventional, another convention was forming: every page is a homepage.

But in multimedia interactives, there’s only one homepage: the interface.

Rethinking the interface

When most multimedia interactives were Flash-based, this wasn’t a problem, because Flash doesn’t allow you to go ‘back’ or ‘forward’ between URLs so there was no need to consider the possibility of a user entering the interactive at different points (unless you split it into separate movies on different webpages). The whole movie sits on one URL, and you start at… the start.

With more and more interactive work using HTML5 or Javascript, however, that becomes a problem. Or rather: an opportunity.

As I’ve worked with students on investigations which were ’chunked’ into different elements (data; multimedia; explainers; case studies) I’ve noticed the same opportunity: each ‘chunk’ is its own homepage: a possible entry point for users into the investigation as a whole.

And that means being clear about the angle on each chunk – not just the product as a whole.

So if your multimedia interactive allows users to browse through a series of interviews, ask: what’s most newsworthy about each? What’s my headline to this, if I assume they haven’t seen any of the other related material? What other material might they want to see next? Will they want to share this individual element? Indeed, should it be published elsewhere too, if it isn’t already? How can it be best optimised for search engines?

In short, the interface is just our choice of arrangement for a set of multimedia elements. Our homepage: not, necessarily, everyone else’s.

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Bella Hurrell is the Specials Editor with BBC News Online. I asked her how data journalism was affecting their work for a forthcoming article. Here is her response in full:

The BBC news specials team produces multimedia interactives, daily graphics as well as more complex data visualisations. The team consists of journalists, designers and developers all working closely together, sitting alongside each other.

We have found that proximity really important to the success of projects. Although we have done this for a while, increasingly other organisations are reorganising along these lines after coming to realise the benefits of breaking down silos and co-locating people with different skillsets can produce more innovative solutions at a faster pace.

As data visualisation has come into the zeitgeist, and we have started using it more regularly in our story-telling, journalists and designers on the specials team have become much more proficient at using basic spreadsheet applications like Excel or Google Docs. We’ve boosted these and other skills through in house training or external summer schools and conferences.

Data as a service, data as a story

There are two interrelated elements to data journalism: firstly data as a service, often involving publicly available data.  The school league tables which the BBC news website has produced every year for over a decade are an example here. We know they are hugely popular and they provide a valuable public service for users. More recently the government has started to get better at putting data / information  online, so we have adjusted our coverage. Instead of replicating what is done by government sites (such as providing individual school pages) we try to provide value by doing something extra, such as mini charts and the ability to select and compare schools - as well as news stories and analysis.

The second element is data as a story. The simple fact that loads of data has been published is not really very interesting to most people. Data is only useful if it is personal – I want to find out about schools in my area, restaurants near me and so on – or when it reveals something remarkable. The duck pond debacle from MPs expenses data or the Iraq civilian death records kept by the US revealed by Wikileaks’ release of the Iraq war documents are both examples of individual stories from big tranches of data that really resonated.

Dealing with large numbers of documents

With data stories that involve thousands of documents we face two challenges. Firstly deciding whether we can provide a platform or tool for people to look at the documents or data. This can be valuable but might involve significant technical resources and may not be worth doing if others are already providing this service.

Secondly we need to find the stories and then report them but clearly that can be tricky when there are thousands of documents to examine. Crowdsourcing is an obvious approach but we need to use what the crowd tells us. When readers told us about potential stories they spotted in the MPs expenses data we pulled in our whole politics team off normal duties to sift users’ questions and put them directly to the relevant MPs. Then we published their answers on our site. This is a very resource heavy approach and not sustainable over a long time.

Another model for reporting stories that involve large sets of data was Panorama’s public sector pay story, where the website partnered with the investigative unit to tell the story online. The Panorama team spent months collecting data and we provided simple visualisations and  a way for users to examine the data.

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Teaching has begun in the new academic year and once again I’m handing out a list of recommended RSS feeds. Last year this came in the form of an OPML file, but this year I’m using Google Reader bundles (instructions on how to create one of your own are here). There are 50 feeds in all – 5 feeds in each of 10 categories. Like any list, this is reliant on my own circles of knowledge and arbitrary in various respects. But it’s a start. I’d welcome other suggestions.

Here is the list with links to the bundles. Each list is in alphabetical order – there is no ranking:

5 of the best: Community

A link to the bundle allowing you to add it to your Google Reader is here.

1. Blaise Grimes-Viort
2. Community Building & Community Management
3. FeverBee
4. ManagingCommunities.com
5. Online Community Strategist

5 of the best: Data

This was a particularly difficult list to draw up – I went for a mix of visualisation (FlowingData), statistics (The Numbers Guy), local and national data (CountCulture and Datablog) and practical help on mashups (OUseful). I cheated a little by moving computer assisted reporting blog Slewfootsnoop into the 5 UK feeds and 10,000 Words into Multimedia. Bundle link here.

1. CountCulture
2. FlowingData
3. Guardian Datablog
4. OUseful.info
5. WSJ.com: The Numbers Guy

5 of the best: Enterprise

There’s a mix of UK and US blogs covering the economic side of publishing here (if you know of ones with a more international perspective I’d welcome suggestions), and a blog on advertising to round things up. Frequency of updates was another factor in drawing up the list. Bundle link here.

1. Ad Sales Blog
2. Media Money
3. Newsonomics
4. Newspaper Death Watch
5. The Information Valet

5 of the best: Industry feeds

Something of a catch-all category. There are a number of BBC blogs I could have included but The Editors is probably the most important. The other 4 feeds cover the 2 most important external drivers of traffic to news sites: search engines and Facebook. Bundle link here.

1. All Facebook
2. BBC News – The Editors
3. Facebook Blog
4. Search Engine Journal
5. Search Engine Land

5 of the best: Feeds on law, ethics and regulation

Trying to cover the full range here: Jack of Kent is a leading source of legal discussion and analysis, and Martin Moore covers regulation, ethics and law regularly. Techdirt is quite transparent about where it sits on legal issues, but its passion is also a strength in how well it covers those grey areas of law and the web. Tech and Law is another regular source, while Judith Townend’s new blog on Media Law & Ethics is establishing itself at the heart of UK bloggers’ attempts to understand where they stand legally. Bundle link here.

1. Jack of Kent
2. Martin Moore
3. Media Law & Ethics
4. Tech and Law
5. Techdirt

5 of the best: Media feeds

There’s an obvious UK slant to this selection, with Editors Weblog and E-Media Tidbits providing a more global angle. Here’s the bundle link.

1. Editors Weblog
2. E-Media Tidbits
3. Journalism.co.uk
4. MediaGuardian
5. paidContent

5 of the best: Feeds about multimedia journalism

Another catch-all category. Andy Dickinson tops my UK feeds, but he’s also a leading expert on online video and related areas. 10,000 Words is strong on data, among other things. And Adam Westbrook is good on enterprise as well as practising video journalism and audio slideshows. Bundle link here.

1. 10,000 Words
2. Adam Westbrook
3. Advancing the Story
4. Andy Dickinson
5. News Videographer

5 of the best: Technology feeds

A mix of the mainstream, the new, and the specialist. As the Guardian’s technology coverage is incorporated into its Media feed, I was able to include ReadWriteWeb instead, which often provides a more thoughtful take on technology news. Bundle link here.

1. Mashable
2. ReadWriteWeb
3. TechCrunch
4. Telegraph Connected
5. The Register

5 of the best: UK feeds

Alison Gow’s Headlines & Deadlines is the best blog by a regional journalist I can think of (you may differ – let me know). Adam Tinworth’s One Man and his Blog represents the magazines sector, and Martin Belam’s Currybetdotnet casts an eye across a range of areas, including the more technical side of things. Murray Dick (Slewfootsnoop) is an expert on computer assisted reporting and has a broadcasting background. The Online Journalism Blog is there because I expect them to read my blog, of course. Bundle link here.

1. Currybetdotnet
2. Headlines and Deadlines
3. One Man & His Blog
4. Online Journalism Blog
5. Slewfootsnoop

5 of the best: US feeds

Jay, Jeff and Mindy are obvious choices for me, after which it is relatively arbitrary, based on the blogs that update the most – particularly open to suggestions here. Bundle link here.

1. BuzzMachine
2. Jay Rosen: Public Notebook
3. OJR
4. Teaching Online Journalism
5. Yelvington.com

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As part of an ongoing series, Deborah Bonello talks about a career that has taken her from business journalism in London to video journalism in South America, and a current role producing video at the FT.

What education and professional experience led to your current job?

After I graduated from Bristol University in 1998 (I wrote for my student newspaper Epigram for most of my time there), I moved up to London and started working for Newsline, an online news service run as part of the media database product Mediatel.

A year later I was taken on by New Media Age as a reporter, where I got to watch the dot com boom become the dot com crash and work with the then-editor, Mike Butcher, now the editor of TechCrunch Europe.

From there I moved to Campaign to edit their Campaign-i section, and when that got cut because of budgets after a year I spent the next few years freelancing on media business magazines (Campaign, Media Week, NMA, FT Creative Business) and watching how the traditional publishing industry took on the internet.

By then, I was fed up of London and business journalism, so I headed off to Latin America. After a year in Argentina as a print only journo, I moved to Mexico to launch NewCorrespondent.com, an experiment in digital journalism, with help from Mike Butcher.

The idea was to use free online tools – YouTube, WordPress, Twitter, Facebook, BlipTv and more – to publish multimedia journalistic content. NewCorrespondent.com became MexicoReporter.com and three months became three years. After my first six months of running the site in Mexico, I got taken on by the Mexico bureau of the Los Angeles Times, started shooting video and got trained in it by some of the best in the business (Scott Anger and Tim French). I contributed daily written and video dispatches to their Latin America blog, La Plaza, as well as latimes.com and the newspaper.

MexicoReporter.com became a go-to for English-speakers living in Mexico, as well as people around the world, and it was through the site that I also got commissioned to produce video pieces for the Guardian and Al Jazeera, amongst others, as well as for radio comment on breaking news such as the swine flu epidemic, violence against journalists and escalating drug-related violence in the country. The video caught the attention of the FT, and as the Los Angeles Times took their foot of the video pedal, it seemed like a good moment to move. I am currently working as a video producer and journalist in the FT’s London office.

What does your job involve?

I film, produce and edit video news, features and interviews for the Financial Times website, sometimes working as a one-man-band shooting operation, sometimes working with in-house camera operators and our correspondents around the UK and abroad.

Where do you see your career/job developing in future?

That all depends on how video journalism develops, but I am very excited about the potential of online journalism and video. TV and video are converging, which means new program formats and genres are emerging all the time, and everyone is experimenting with different styles of telling stories in video and multimedia.

I am especially interested in how the costs of technology have come down so dramatically that we should see a new generation of visual and text storytellers base themselves abroad at a fraction of the cost, tapping into the need for reduced costs in foreign reporting that the traditional media so desperately needs to survive to keep that content strand going.

Right now, if you’re a journalist that isn’t using new technologies to tell stories, you’re edging yourself out of the job market. Rather than the end of journalism as we know it, I think multimedia signifies a brave new world where our old disciplines still count but can manifest themselves across so many different platforms and media that your work is as creative and innovative as you want it to be. We just have to make sure we keep our eyes on the journalistic disciplines, and use technology as a means to an end rather than just for the sake of it.

In the long-term, I see myself based out in the Spanish-speaking world as a multimedia foreign correspondent.

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In this fifth and second to last part of this series I’ll review the research on how and to what degree multimedia is utilized in online journalism.

Previous parts of this series have focused on the revolution that never happened (part 1); how to define the three main assets of new technology to online journalism — interactivity, hypertext and multimedia (part 2); the research on the use of hypertext in online journalism (part 3); and the research on online journalism and interactivity (part4).

Content analysis studies

As with hypertext and interactivity, most studies of multimedia in online journalism rely on content analysis of websites. Tanjev Schultz (1999) found that only 16 percent of online newspapers in the US had multimedia applications in the late 1990s. Two more qualitative oriented content analysis studies revealed similar lack of multimedia (In the US, Canada and the Netherlands: Nicholas W. Jankowski and Martine van Selm (2000); In the US: Wendy Dibean and Bruce Garrison (2001) (only excerpt available for free)).

Jankowski and van Selm concluded that of all supposed added value facilities of online journalism multimedia “is perhaps the most underdeveloped” (2000, p. 7). However, online news sites affiliated with TV stations were more prone to utilize multimedia according to the same study. Yet, in a more extensive investigation of TV broadcasters’ online news sites in the US (pdf available), Mary Jackson Pitts (2003, p. 5)  lamented: “[t]he majority of stations provide text-only stories, thus failing to use the multimedia capabilities of the web”.

In their extensive investigation of European online journalism, Richard van der Wurff and Lauf (Eds) (2005) found that print newspapers were as much about multimedia as online newspapers (this study is not available online). Thorsten Quandt (2008) (only abstract available for free)  found that 84.5 percent of the 1600 stories he analyzed in 10 online news sites in the US, the UK, Germany, France and Russia were strictly text-based.

In Scandinavia, Martin Engebretsen (2006) (pdf available) found that online newspapers used a bit more multimedia, but still not more than found in previous studies in the US. Daniela V. Dimitrova and Matt Neznanski’s (2006) study of the coverage of the Iraq war in 2003 in 17 online newspapers from the US and elsewhere showed no increase in the use of video and audio in the US newspapers compared to Tanjev Schultz’s study published seven years earlier. Furthermore, they found minimal difference between the international and the US online newspapers (slightly more use of multimedia in the US online newspapers). However, Jennifer D. Greer & Donica Mensing (2006) (book chapter partly available through Google books) found a significant increase in multimedia use during the same period (1997-2003) in their longitudinal study of online newspapers in the US.

Interviews and surveys

Studies relying on interviews and surveys with online journalists and editors reveal some of the possible reasons for the lack of multimedia in online journalism found in the content analysis studies. According to Michele Jackson and Nora Paul (1998) (the US) and Christoph Neuberger et al. (1998) (Germany) online journalists and editors had a positive attitude towards utilizing multimedia technology, but problems related to lack of staff, inadequate transmission capacity and other technical issues obstructed the materialization of multimedia content.

Later studies indicate that online journalists and editors downscale the value of multimedia content: Thorsten Quandt et al. (2006) (only abstract available for free) found that multimedia was considered to be the least important feature of web technology for online journalism. John O’Sullivan (2005) found similar results in his qualitative interviews with Irish online journalists (only abstract available for free). Niel Thurman and Ben Lupton interviewed 10 senior editors and managers affiliated with British online news providers and found that the general sentiment was that “text was still core” (2008, p. 15). However, in his PhD dissertation (which is not available online)  Arne H. Krumsvik, in interviews with CNN and NRK (Norwegian public broadcaster) executives, found a much more positive attitude towards multimedia than towards interactivity and hypertext (2009, p. 145). And in a recent case study of multimedia content on the BBC online (only abstract available for free),  Einar Thorsen concludes that video content has increased tremendously (Thorsen, 2010).

User studies

There are not many studies that investigate the users’ attitudes towards multimedia news online.  In an experimental study (pdf), S. Shyam Sundar (2000) found that those who read text-only versions of a story gained more insight into the topic of the story than those who read/viewed multimedia versions of the same story. Hans Beyers (2005) (pdf) found that only 26.4 of the Flemish online newspaper readers in his survey thought the added value of multimedia was an important reason to read online newspapers.

Multimedia summarized

To summarize the findings of the research on multimedia in online journalism deriving from the techno-approach, it seems that multimedia remains the least developed of the assets offered to journalism by Internet technology. Online journalism is mostly about producing, distributing and consuming written text in various forms, even though some recent studies describe an increase in the use of especially video. This falls in line with the general increase in online video watching described in a recent Pew Internet report. However, it seems that online news sites are struggling to cope with multimedia.

In the last part of this series I will conclude on what we might learn from the research on the utilization of hypertext, interactivity and multimedia in online journalism. Might their be other ways of understanding the development of online journalism then through the lens of technological innovation?

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This post is cross-published from my new journalism/new media-blog.

In the first post in this series I argued that technology may not play such an important role to the development of journalism in new media as people seem to believe. In this post I will look at the three assets of new technology that are generally portrayed as the most significant for journalism in new media: multimedia, interactivity and hypertext (see for instance this article by Mark Deuze for arguments on why these three assets have been considered the most important for online journalism).

The general assumption of the “techno-researchers” has been that an innovative approach to online journalism implies utilizing these three assets of new technology. There are, of course, lots of other technological assets and/or concept related to technology that keeps popping up in the discourse on online journalism:

• In a 1996 article (pdf available here), Peter Dalhgren spoke of archival and figurational.
• Christpher Harper (in his 1998 book “And that’s the way it will be”), Jospeh D. Lasica (in this 2002 article) and others spoke of personalization in some way or the other, inspired by the (in the second half of the 1990s)  much hyped concept of “the Daily Me”, introduced by Nicholas Negroponte.
• John Pavlik (in his popular 2001 book Journalism and new media) added contextualisation and ubiquity.
• In recent years much attention has been given to the asset of immediacy (see for instance David Domingo 2006 PhD dissertation available as a pdf here).
• In a 2008 conference paper available for download here, Fernando Zamith extended the list to a compilation of seven assets: interactivity, hypertextuality, multimediality, immediacy, ubiquity, memory and personalization.

In addition, the literature on technology and online journalism is flooded by a sea of different concepts that describe similar or even the same phenomenon or asset – concepts like convergence, transparency, hypermedia, user-generated content (UGC), participatory journalism, civic journalism, wiki-journalism and crowdsourcing.

However, most of these (additional) assets can be treated as concretizations of interactivity, hypertext and multimedia depending of course on how these three concepts are defined. In Table 1 I lay out the different concepts that flood the literature to make visible how I understand their reliance to hypertext, interactivity and multimedia.

Table 1: Different concept related to new technology and online journalism and how they relate to multimedia, hypertext and interctivity

It must, however, be noted that the techno-approach research lacks commonly accepted definitions of hypertext, interactivity and multimedia. This creates some confusion as to what these characteristics represent and how they differ from one another. What some label “interactivity”, others label “hypertext”. In fact, both hypertext and multimedia can be characterized (and are often characterized) as “interactivity”. As is visible in Table 1, I treat several concepts that are understood by others as interactivity as belonging to hypertext.

Below I will lay out how I understand hypertext, multimedia and interactivity – please feel free to disagree with me.

Hypertext

Hypertext is generally understood as a computer based non-linear group of texts (i.e. written text, images etc) that are linked together with hyperlinks. The term was first coined by Ted Nelson who described it (in a 1965 Association for Computing Machinery conference paper) rather roughly as “a series of text chunks connected by links which offer the reader different pathways”.

Most scholars researching hypertext in online journalism rely on what Espen Aarseth in the book Cybertext labels a “computer industrial rhetoric”,  i.e. an understanding of hypertext as a technological function (made visible by the electronic link) rather than an observable practice of interaction between text and reader. Researchers interested in hypertext as a text-reader practice are more likely to coin the object of study a practice of interactivity rather than a practice of hypertext.

The general assumption of researchers interested in hypertextual online journalism is that if hypertext is used innovatively it would provide a range of advantages over print journalism: no limitations of space, the possibility to offer a variety of perspectives, no finite deadline, direct access to sources, personalized paths of news perception and reading, contextualization of breaking news, and simultaneous targeting of different groups of readers – those only interest in the headlines and those interested in the deeper layers of information and sources.

Interactivity

Like hypertext, interactivity is a slippery concept that is used to describe numerous processes related to communication in general and practices like online journalism in particular. Based on a review of the “history” of interactivity, Jens F. Jensen arrives at this definition in a 1999 Nordicom Review article (pdf): Interactivity is “a measure of a media’s potential ability to let the user exert an influence on the content and/or form of the mediated communication”.

Jensen separates interaction from interactivity and his definition is therefore mainly a technological one. Interaction refers to the social dimension of interactivity, and Sally J. McMillan argues for an incorporation of this dimension as well. Accordingly, she has identified six different understandings of interactivity along two different axes:

Table 2: Six notions of interactivity, according to McMillan (2005)

All these kinds of interactivity may be found in an online newspaper. However, the Human-to-Computer axis is similar to what I above understood as hypertext. I will therefore treat the research covering this axis as related to hypertext.

Out of the then six notions of interactivity that are left only two seem to have occupied researchers of interactivity in online journalism to a great extent: human-to-human (both features and processes). This research is dominated by questions such as to what degree users are allowed to interact with online newsrooms/online journalists through emails; to what degree online news site offer discussion forums; and whether users are allowed to comment on stories or in other ways be involved in the production process.

Multimedia

In the article “What is multimedia journalism?”  published in Journalism Studies in 2004 (pdf available for download here),  Mark Deuze argues that the concept of multimedia in online journalism studies generally is understood in either of two ways: 1) as a presentation of a news story package where two or more media formats are utilized (e.g. text, audio, video, graphics etc), or 2) as a distribution of a news story packaged through different media (e.g. newspaper, website, radio, television etc).

Most research on multimedia in online journalism deals with the first understanding. When I in the following posts use the term multimedia I will therefore have it refer to such an understanding, albeit in a bit more pragmatic sense that better fit the empirical research on multimedia in online journalism. Since an online news story with text and a photo is generally not considered to be multimedia, I will have the term refer to stories and websites where more than two media are utilized. I will also let the term include not only the presentation of news, but also the production of news.

That’s more than enough definitions and introductory notes. Please feel free to share any disagreements and other types of comments. In the three following posts I will review the research on interactivity, hypertext and multimedia in online journalism the last decade.

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David Berman is a multimedia photojournalist who works as a photographer at Northcliffe’s Surrey Mirror. I asked him some questions about his role which I thought I would post here. But first, a showreel of his work…

“I started making Soundslides at the Croydon Advertiser at the back end of ’06, and kept presenting both on- and off-diary assignments as Soundslides and, later, video. There is still some interest locally at the paper for me to do multimedia stuff but only if it doesn’t ‘get in the way of proper work’.

“What is a multimedia photojournalist? A photographer who is unafraid of learning new skills and technologies. A photographer who is passionate about telling stories, shooting compelling images be it still or video. I look at it as an opportunity to get back to being a story teller not just a space filler for the print edition. I shoot, I edit and I publish.

“Why are photographers good VJ’s? The best of us can see a frame and fill it with vibrancy, compose it well and create the story visually. The words, the interview? It’s not so hard. All my life as a stills shooter I’ve basically interviewed people on every assignment. I now just need to structure more and record peoples answers. Of course I still have a lot to learn, but I think that the snappers who are either refusing to learn new skills or allowing themselves to be sidelined to remain one trick ponies, just shooting stills, are failing to plan for the future. My multimedia productions can play across the web, TV or iPhone, they will look good on iPad. I shoot HD on a proper video camera with pro sound capture and can broadcast live video from the scene and do a piece to camera.

“As a multimedia photojournalist I shoot stills or video or both. I am a good communicator. I can empathise with the man who cleans the drains and I can walk tall before the Queen. In short, the MM PJ could be one of the most powerful tools in the newspaper’s arsenal and should be encouraged to take part in the development of the organisation.

“Reporters and Flip cams are great for breaking news but I believe to fully engage readers you need to have a gold standard for those other stories. Shot well, lit well and presented as well as TV does.

“It used to be the case that the audience would watch badly made web video but I no longer think this is the case. The more local news websites deliver poor audio and video the less the advertiser will wish to be involved. Make the downtime of the phojo work for the ad dept. It’s exactly what I am planning at the moment.

“I am able to train others and would be happy to do that but – and this is the big but – there needs to be a desire to move to the web. My old Chief Ian Carter has seen the way forward with his move to the Kent Messenger. Their web video is pretty good. I’m not sure on their stats but I know the site is compelling.

“Look at the Argus in Brighton. Jo Wadsworth, an old colleague of mine from the Ad, is doing great stuff with their site but the video content is poor considering the quality of some of their staff photographers.

“It isn’t easy to find this new place as a MM photojournalist after all, who the hell are we?”

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Reuters has been among the leading news organizations in its use of Internet technology, both in its forays into citizen participation in the developed and developing worlds, and in experimenting with audio visual tools to offer fine narrative journalism.

Following the success of its online documentary on the Iraq war last year, Bearing Witness, Reuters recently produced another interactive multimedia time line, this one elucidating on the impact of the current financial crisis.

In Bearing Witness, the agency brought together five years of reporting from 100 correspondents and photographers to give a comprehensive account of significant events that transpired during half a decade of the war, from reasons that led to the conflict, recounts of battles in various Iraqi cities from Baghdad to Fallujah, the army offensive led by the US and its allies, and political, economic, and social consequences. In addition to offering personal accounts from its reporters, the project illustrates numbers and statistics through elaborate infographics.

The Times of Crisis project offers a peak into the impact of the current financial disaster over the course of a year since it was first set off by the collapse of Lehman Brothers. It is a compelling narrative not only in terms of its rich multimedia interactivity, but also in what it brings in terms of the human face of the impact, providing anecdotes and stories from real people.

I recently got a chance to interview Jassim Ahmad, Head of Visual Projects at Reuters, over e-mail. Below is the exchange:

Q. What inspired Reuters to do this? What was your main motive behind the two projects?

We were first inspired to produce Bearing Witness to mark half a decade of war in Iraq – a story to which Reuters has dedicated a team of 100 correspondents, photographers, cameramen and editorial support staff. The conflict has been the most dangerous in history for the press. 139 journalists and 51 media support staff have been killed (latest figures from CPJ) including seven Reuters colleagues. Our ambition was to go much further than simply repackage our coverage. We sought to tell the wider story through reflection and behind the scenes perspectives of conflict reporting.

Bearing Witness received exceptionally positive feedback and picked up a string of awards in the US, UK, France and Italy. We chose the financial crisis for our next initiative – undoubtedly one of the biggest stories of our times and one which Reuters is able to tell with exceptional depth with its financial expertise. Whereas most news coverage has understandably focused on the local and regional effects of the crisis, ours would attempt to show its global significance.

Chronology is the natural backbone of a wire news agency. We wanted to re-imagine the classical news “time line” with a much more visual approach.

Q. As someone that coordinates such visual projects, I was wondering if you could shed some light on how a story is approached differently for multimedia vs. text. Is there a different philosophy when a journalist has to let pictures and videos tell a story without getting in the way of it?

There is no one multimedia model. We try to embark upon each project with fresh eyes. Each subject determines its own mix of special reporting, research and interactive design. Unlike automated feed and search-based approaches, we would manually curate the story for quality and cohesion. Through 15 streams of information spanning news, visuals and data, we carefully pieced together this puzzle into a single fluid narrative – putting the story in its total cross-media context in a way only multimedia can achieve.

Q. Do you feel that these sorts of multimedia projects afford people deep, contextual knowledge without them having to go through 20 odd pages of print to get the same breadth of detail? In other words, can this sort of journalism replace traditional reported pieces?

Photography in particular is unparalleled at conveying information with power and immediacy. We would weave together stories, pictures, video, graphics and data so that each piece of information advances the story within an immersive mixed-media experience. This accessible framework would deliver both immediate impact and greater depth for those that sought it.

There are different degrees of production and in-depth multimedia is not a replacement for existing forms of journalism. However, for the appropriate subject, it can deliver unequalled emotion, clarity and understanding.

Q. In countries and regions where high-speed Internet is still not very prevalent and where broadband is not accessible, could such stories pose limits on readership, as they tend to be time consuming and extensive? Is that a problem?

Lack of broadband connectivity is a barrier for many, but multimedia need not always equate to bandwidth-intensive video. Our interactive visual timeline is a case in point. I would argue that language and complete lack of connectivity for many are greater barriers. That said, rebranded editions of Times of Crisis were simultaneously launched on client web sites from Australia to France, Germany to the Gulf. Whereas Reuters content traditionally feeds into our clients’ products, this shows how we can be end-producers for our clients on stories with global resonance.

Q. Despite the effectiveness of such multimedia projects, why do you think more mainstream organizations are not doing these types of stories? Did Reuters encounter any resistance when you embarked on these initiatives?

Rich multimedia demands editorial time and creative resources, as does all special coverage. For those willing to invest in production, the reward is compelling, distinctive site-building content. Finding new ways to engage audiences has to be a key step towards securing new streams of revenue.

Reuters has the advantage of a truly global presence and teams working in every medium. We continue to use this basis to explore new approaches to information gathering, visualisation and interactivity to evolve storytelling.

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What could possibly be common between a detailed account of America’s historic role in Middle East peace and a story about urban acrobats leaping across buildings in London and Beirut? Perhaps, the way in which you choose to tell them.

Designed to look and read like a magazine, complete with the swishing sound that accompanies each turn of a fascinating page, the innovative young site Flyp media, which is being hailed as a “future media lab,” is attempting to straddle the boundaries between the old and the new, between print and celluloid, and between Web creation and journalism.

Videos, podcasts and interactive images are embedded on pages that could well be bound and dropped into your mailbox. It is as much the art of story telling as the story itself. “Flyp the magazine is really a proof-of-concept experiment in terms of multimedia story telling. It is not a product that we’re aimed at as much as the message and the form,” says Editor in Chief Jim Gaines.

Covering topics as wide-ranging as science, business, politics, the economy, and every day life, Flyp’s connecting thread is this very commitment to mixed-media reporting. The well-crafted semblance to print (what Gaines calls an “architectural vestige that is comforting in this transition period”) with its margins, page numbers and folio lines might seem excessive until you factor in the number of people that stay away from the Amazon Kindle because it doesn’t have the look and feel of paper.

What happens at Flyp is true convergence of media. “We start with everybody in the room – the videographers, the animators, the designers, the audio person, the editor, and the reporter and try to figure out what is the best combination of media to tell that particular story,” says Gaines. “The story is created in all media at once.”

Reason why a piece detailing the Afghan conflict doesn’t rely merely on text to illustrate Pakistan’s vital role in the forgotten war; the accompanying videos convey opinions from public officials and experts, and vivid pictures and infographics reinforce the facts. It is this same propensity to interactive technology that prompts Bernie Madoff to wink from the cover page of an in-depth article elucidating on his elaborate Ponzi scheme.

Could excessive use of multimedia, however, take away from the significance of the message it tries to deliver? Not when you can keep the medium and the message sufficiently discrete, says Gaines. “What’s good about multimedia is that we can allow people to do either one – we can run the material in layers as we did with the Madoff story.” Articles are available in text-only formats or as audio podcasts for as much the reader’s convenience as for Google’s ability to track them. Flyp may be slightly ahead of its time as search engines still have trouble keeping up with flash animation and rich media technology.

The upside of this same technology, of course, is reader interactivity. Interactivity at Flyp is more than a comments thread and a survey poll. Clickable tables, charts and graphics allow active interplay with the user, and quizzes and games supplement stories to keep the reader absorbed. Complex topics such as bioterrorism and astronomy are creatively explained through the use of schematics and animation. Little wonder then that the Flyp team insists on calling its creations “experiences,” as opposed to mere stories.

Few things do more justice to new media technology than personal narratives and citizen accounts, and Flyp taps into these formats well. Iraqi students talk about their experiences at US universities and laid-off Americans offer innovative ideas to network and market oneself in today’s economy, as you “leaf through pages” of the accompanying articles.

“Telling stories through the lens of a fellow human being’s life is always the best way to get something across,” says Gaines, who spent many years telling human-interest stories in traditional journalism, as former editor of Time, Life and People magazines. “When you can see someone talking about their pain or their experience or their joy or their sorrow, it makes video and audio so compelling as a method of storytelling.”

Gaines believes that magazines with healthy audiences and good advertising franchises need only to make a revolutionary transition in the method of telling a story. Many traditional organizations are not thinking creatively enough to get themselves out of trouble. “When you’re in the middle of a car accident and you see the crash coming, you can’t think of anything else, and I think there’s a metaphor there for where print finds itself at the moment,” he says.

Talking of the crisis, what about new media monetization? Despite partnerships with Fortune.com and Warner Music, Flyp Media hasn’t yet tried to monetize content, like hundreds of innovative new startups out there.

Gaines’ answer to that is not very different from his solution to creative news delivery: multimedia technology. It is in the best interest of advertisers to create rich media advertisements that audiences really want to engage with, he says. This would have another useful consequence: creating a new demand equation because there is only so much rich media that the traffic can bear. This would create less ad space, and hence, more revenue for target sites.

It is certainly tempting to embrace this as the new business model for journalism. But do time-starved readers who refuse to scroll through unforgiving columns of long text, and often satisfy themselves with summaries from their RSS feeds, be willing to watch a 3-minute commercial in addition to the video clip that was an integral part of the news story?

Just how limitless is this thirst for new media consumption? That is what remains to be answered, and Flyp Media comes as close to posing the question as anyone else.

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Elsevier, the Dutch scientific publisher, has announced details of their grandly titled Article of the Future project.  Their prototypes, published at http://beta.cell.com, are the result of what Emilie Marcus, Editor in Chief, Cell Press called,

“…a challenge to redesign from scratch how to most effectively structure and present the content of a traditional scientific article in an online environment.”

Prototypes
Several things strike me about the prototypes — and let’s bear in mind that these are prototypes, and so are likely to change based on feedback from users in the scientific community and elsewhere; but also that they are published prototypes, and so by definition are completely open for comment — the most obvious being their remarkable lack of futuristic qualities.  Instead, the prototypes resemble an enthusiastic bash at a multimedia-infused online encyclopaedia circa 1997, when multimedia was still a buzzword, or such as you might have found on a CD-ROM magazine cover mounted giveaway around the same time.

Now, I know relatively little about the scientific journal community, or how they consume their publications online.  But I imagine they will be intrigued though underwhelmed by an international publisher of scientific journals presenting them with these prototypes as the future of their work online.

Design
There is a lack of nuance, uniformity and overall cohesion in the article designs which immediately make me feel uneasy.  From a scientific journal I expect highly structured, easily accessible data.  The inconsistency in design and layout here means I have to work harder to know where I am in the document and what exactly I’m looking at.  Additionally, the wide text columns, combined with poor linespacing, lack of subheadings and lack of general hierarchical structure within the text contribute to overall poor readability.  I’d also suggest that the tabbed element leaves little room for expansion should the number of article sections increase.  There is also too much emphasis on distracting design elements like pop-ups and modal dialogues to present small snippets of data which would have been far more suitably presented within their referencing context.

Information architecture
There is a poor overall data structure, and to much repetition of content elements such as the figures.  Although this data structure undoubtedly encourages an initial period of browsing and discovery it also precludes an easy, linear reading of the content and lengthens the user journey considerably.

Development
From a development point of view it is important to note that these prototypes are completely reliant on JavaScript to present all of their content.  Without JavaScript the browser will only render the first tab’s content visibly.  Needless to say this is unacceptable on the modern web.  Separation of content, presentation and behaviour were long ago accepted as the minimum standard for a modern, user-friendly and broadly accessible web page.  Any web pages being designed now by international publishers should display this characteristic, especially this which claim to represent the future of the medium.  Similarly, these prototypes both have an obnoxious amount of inline JavaScript, making machine readability and text-browser readability a major pain, verging on the unusable.

Data
Perhaps the most important point of all — where’s the data?  XML and specifications like RDF are capable of representing structured scientific data online in such a way that it can be consumed by browsers, applications and other user agents we haven’t yet developed.  Scientific research data would seem to be a perfect candidate to display the power of the semantic web, and yet Elsevier appears to have shown a complete ignorance of its availability, its ability to open up data to a wider audience and to normalise data and allow consumers of data and information to use it in the manner most appropriate to them.

Maintenance
Are there authoring tools for creation and maintenance of these articles?  Is there a published schema and validator to ensure consistency between producers?  Which user needs does this article format address?  Will Elsevier publish their user research so we can better understand the problems users have with current scientific paper formats?  The whole format seems not to have been thought through properly.  Why not work with the W3C and other organisations dedicated to the description and ongoing development and maintenance of online document specifications.  Use the power of groups already working in this space instead of reinventing the wheel, badly.

Innovation?
Jan Aalbersberg, Vice President of Content Innovation for Elsevier Science & Technology Journal Publishing, says “We are confident that these tools will enhance the presentation of scientific results and improve the interpretation and speed of results analysis. They are central to driving innovation in scientific publishing and represent our investment in the future of research, enabling scientists all over the world to access, interpret, and create better science more efficiently.”  But I say that these “Articles of the Future” are not tools, and they are no more innovative than using a page layout application to alter the appearance of some printed matter.  Hyperlinking and the ability to add media files to a page have existed since the web was created, and these articles add nothing more to that basic paradigm of linked data files.  There are some nods towards current trends, with a comment feature and social bookmarking links.  But overall the feel is clunky, lacking research and distinctly amateur.

Articles of the Future?
Finally, there are two noteworthy features which may tell us more about the project, its origins and its ultimate destination than the prototypes themselves.  Firstly, the copyright notice, which proclaims the pages to be copyright of Elsevier 2008.  Are these prototypes already at least 6 months old?  Marcus herself notes,

“The rapid pace of technological advancements means this will undoubtedly be an evolving design,”

but is this an indication of the kind of turnaround we can expect for amendments and improvements to the article’s format?  Secondly, the entire article can be downloaded as a PDF, in its original published format, and which is perfect for printing, and I suspect that, excepting casual browsers, this will be how most users choose to consume their scientific research and analysis.

I think this area of publishing is indeed long overdue a complete overhaul of its staid online publishing practices, and any move to define a new specification for doing so should be welcomed.  Even the otherwise impressive nature.com only goes so far in its presentation of research papers, and there is much room for improvement.  But when the result is as underwhelming, cumbersome and shortsighted as this, I despair.

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