(Read part 1 here; part 2 here and part 3 here)

The ‘breadth portfolio’ was only worth 20% of the Multimedia Journalism module, and was largely intended to be exploratory, but Alex Gamela used it to produce work that most journalists would be proud of.

Firstly, he worked with maps and forms to cover the Madeira Island mudslides:

“When on the 20th of February a storm hit Madeira Island, causing mudslides and floods, the silence on most news websites, radios and TV stations was deafening. But on Twitter there were accounts from local people about what was going on, and, above all, they had videos. The event was being tagged as #tempmad, so it was easy to follow all the developments, but the information seemed to be too scattered to get a real picture of what was going on in the island, and since there was no one organizing the information available, I decided to create a map on Google[ii], to place videos, pictures and other relevant information.

“It got 10,000 views in the first hours and reached 30,000 in just two days. One month later, it has the impressive number of 77 thousand visits.”

Not bad, then.

Secondly, Alex experimented with data visualisation to look at newspaper brand values and the online traffic of Portuguese news websites.

“My goal was to understand the relative and proportional position of each one, regarding visits, page views, and how those two values relate to each other. The data I got also has portals, specialized websites, and entertainment magazines so it has a broad range of themes (all charts are available live here – http://is.gd/aZLXs)”

And finally, he produced a beautiful Flash interactive on Moseley Road Baths (which he talks about here).

All of which was produced and submitted within the first six weeks of the Multimedia Journalism module.

The other 80%: multimedia archive journalism

Alex was particularly interested in archive journalism and using multimedia to bring archives to life. As a way of exploring this he produced the Paranoia Timeline, a website exploring “all the events that caused some type of social hysteria throughout the world in the last 20 years.

“Some of the situations presented here were real dangers, others not really. But all caused disturbances in our daily lives … Why does that happen? Why are we caught in these bursts of information, sometimes based on speculative data and other times borne out of the imagination of few and fed by the beliefs of many?”

The site – which is an ongoing project in its earliest stages – combines video, visualisation, a Dipity timeline, mapping and the results of some fascinating data and archive journalism. Alex explains:

“The swine flu data came from Wolfram-Alpha[vi] that generated a rather reliable (after cross checking with other official websites) amount of data, with the number of cases and deaths per country. I had to make an option about which would be highlighted, but discrepancies in the logical amount of cases between countries made me go just for the death numbers. The conclusion that I got from the map is that swine flu was either more serious or reported in the developed countries. Traditionally considered Third World countries do not have many reports, which reflect the lack of structures to deal with the problem or how overhyped it was in the Western world. But France on its own had almost 3 million cases reported against 57 thousand in the United States, which led me to verify closely other sources. It seems Wolfram Alpha had the number wrong, there were only about 5000 reports, which proves that outliers in data are either new stories or just input errors.

“For the credit crunch[vii], I researched the FDIC – Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation[viii] database. They have a considerable amount of statistical data available for download. My idea was to chart the evolution of loans in the United States in the last years, and the main idea was that overall loans slowed down since 2009 but individual credits rose, meaning an increase in personal debt to cope with overall difficulties caused by the crunch.I selected the items that seemed more relevant and went for a simple line chart. My purpose was served.”

“Though the current result falls short of my initial goals,” says Alex, “it is a prototype for a more involving experience, and I consider it to be a work in construction. What I’ll be defending here is a concept with a few examples using interactive tools, but I realize this is just a small sample of what it can really be: an immersive, ongoing project, with more interactive features, providing a journalistic approach to issues highly debated and prone to partisanship, many of them used by religious and political groups to spin their own ideologies to the general audience. The purpose is to create context.”

Alex is currently back in Portugal as he completes the final MA by Production part of his Masters. You might want to hire him, or Caroline, Dan, Ruihua, Chiara, Natalie or Andy.