Multimedia and Interactive Doesn’t Mean Flash, Video and Audio.
April 1st, 2008 | by Brad King |I’m trying not to keep my brain from exploding inside my skull, but the more I read stories that explain to journalists what a good interactive, multi-media presentation should look like, the more difficult it becomes.
Let me try to explain. The National Press Photographers Association has an online competition for news presentations. I’m not going to address the idea of photographers having an online presentation competition for newspapers; well, I am not going to right now.
There were six judges, and only one — a professor and interactive editor — had a title that would suggest some understanding of what true interactivity would be.
But that’s not the insane part.
The judges went through what worked and what didn’t, an admirable idea. What they said was completely insane, though.
ONE: you don’t need a Flash designer to make a really cool presentation.
That may be true, but you actually should have programmers on staff who can work with AIR or Silverlight. At the very least, they should be creating interactive databases that will allow readers to display content in multiple ways, instead of simply a one-to-many design.
Two of the multiple issues the judges discussed were poor interface design and too little user control; but there is no connection to having 2d designers and programmers? Really?
TWO: while discussing audio, the judges said natural sound was good (radio people tell me this is true) and then they proceed to discuss voice-overs from subjects (which is not natural sound, it’s voice-overs).
This leads me to believe that either the reporter got the information screwed up, or none of these folks have ever discussed audio with radio folks.
The best thing that newspapers can do is completely ignore this article and the judges’ recommendations and instead talk with some really smart technologists who understand usability, audience, interactivity and the Web.
A truly innovative interactive project would include mashups, API kits, maps, real-time tracking of information (or at least real-time when the story was put together). The content — whatever it is — would be the reward for the interactivity. Users should also be able to pull all the information OUT of the interactive environment to read, watch or experience the content simply as content.
In other words, give the user what they want.
Not a damn slideshow.
2 Responses to “Multimedia and Interactive Doesn’t Mean Flash, Video and Audio.”
By david on Apr 1, 2008 | Reply
I’ve wondered about the whole slide show mentality.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I think this was something cooked up originally by the business Web sites. As I recall, they figured out that you could bullet point a news story in a PowerPoint-lite format and blow it to the Web. As weird as it was, it made sense to a readership used to having complexity reduced to a few points and some fancy background graphics.
Once the news and consumer sites picked up on it, it somehow turned from curious business kink to mainstream method for sharing information.
If I’m right, this would explain something. What passes for modern journalism is too often accidents that no one has taken much time to examine. Seriously, who would have ever thought the future of newswriting was Powerpoint?
Me, I never look at such things.
– David
By Brad on Apr 1, 2008 | Reply
It has never made sense to me, either. The only thing I can figure is the tools make it easy enough for anyone to do — so journalists with little or no actual technology training can easily throw this up on the Web.
The problem: they often get huge hits, but they would certainly not meet Alterman’s definition of first-rate journalism.
Instead of hiring people who actually know how to build these networks in ways that could benefit journalists, they use these silly tools and call it a day.