We talked last week by phone with USA Today interactives director Joshua Hatch about “Five Years Later: Hurricane Katrina,” the paper’s attempt to document the recovery and continuing struggles of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. With a prologue and three chapters (Effects, Rebuilding and Unsettled), the project includes maps, interactive visuals, video and bare-bones [...]
Category Archives: interactive narratives
USA Today’s Katrina anniversary project: stories from the second line
When clicking across the digital universe, we like new bells and whistles as much as the next Twitter jockey. But with big multimedia projects, we want to feel the bones of the story undergirding the graphs and demographics. So we’re pleased to select USA Today’s “Five Years Later: Hurricane Katrina” as our latest Notable Narrative.
How [...]
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Flow
by Peggy Nelson |
July 23, 2010
Nothing prepares you for your first time. You’re out with someone, maybe a date, maybe just friends, everything’s fine, and then he whips it out, right in front of you — at a restaurant, on the street, anywhere. You try not to look at it, you try to look absolutely anywhere else — finally he [...]
Audience storytelling from “Star Wars” to “Top Secret America”: interactivity across the spectrum
Chewbacca and Washington Post reporters may have more in common than you think: both might get an assist from the general public on in-depth projects that are in the news this week.
“Top Secret America,” The Washington Post’s massive effort to identify a network of secret facilities blanketing the nation, has garnered particular attention today. For [...]
“There’s no app for that”: Peggy Nelson talks timing, technology and story
Journalists use technology to tell stories, but technology has its own stories to tell, sometimes the very opposite of the ones we expect. In this series of articles, I’ll explore the impact of technology on narrative, and offer some observations from my work in new media — how technology suggests new types of tales, and new [...]
USC’s Henry Jenkins on multimedia storytelling: what can journalists learn from He-Man?
When it comes to narrative multimedia, how can we reimagine storytelling from the ground up? What if templates for new models were right in front of us? In a recent post on his blog, University of Southern California professor Henry Jenkins addressed the topic of “He-Man and the Masters of Transmedia.” (Hat tip to Nieman Lab [...]
Writing is part of the digital story: examples of powerful multimedia presentations that incorporate (not just link to) good nonfiction writing
[Earlier this week, Jacqueline Marino wrote about the many words that often accompany multimedia stories on Interactive Narratives, a showcase of such work sponsored by the Online News Association. Today, she provides some examples of presentations that integrate writing into the storytelling.]
Annesha’s daughter prays in front of the Altar in the backyard (Joshua Cogan 2008)
1. Hope: Living [...]
The importance of words in multimedia storytelling
by Jacqueline Marino |
April 21, 2010
Journalists are told to write short for the Web. The online audience wants information, not a lovely phrase or a rousing metaphor. “On the Web, people want to move quickly,” says Hoa Loranger, quoted on a video for a Web writing session at the 2009 Online News Association conference. “Our challenge is to adapt to that behavior.”
Journalism—even that of [...]
Canada’s GDP Project: documenting the economic crisis, one story at a time
A woman confronts financial distress by starting a project to do 100 jobs for $100 each. A painter, musician and former stripper moves to Toronto and tries to start over. A father loses his job at a factory and, with his teenage daughter, becomes homeless. Welcome to the economic crisis in Canada.
The producers behind Canada’s GDP [...]
Marie-Claude Dupont on Canada’s GDP Project: “we’re trying to show how these people reinvent themselves”
We spoke this week with Marie-Claude Dupont, producer of the GDP Project, an effort to document the economic crisis in Canada. Funded by the National Film Board, the project’s filmmakers track the lives of 15 Canadians for one year, while photographers simultaneously collect images and audio from around over the country. Dupont, who has worked [...]
