My initial reflections
Thanks for setting this up!
I agree with Matt that the “silo” boundaries continue to blur for many or – for folks like us – have already faded into the pages of the “history” textbooks titled “mass communication.” This moment in multimedia is tremendously exciting to me since I finally see opportunities to parse the different modes (textual, audio, video, etc.) and their related techniques and then deciding how all of these elements can be used to tell one coherent story. For the typical news consumer seeking the latest information, good bye to linear video, multiple paragraphs of text, stand alone Flash documentaries or any one of the above without supplemental content from another. Of course there will always be a specific audience for this long form journalism, but that’s not the focus of my interest.
Maryland is in a unique position to devise courses with experts that address BOTH the tools of the trade and the CONTENT produced by those tools. There was little discussion about content production at the story level in the ONA sessions I attended. In other words, great tools, great short-cuts, nice designs and interesting ways to collect, illustrate or aggregate info, but I didn’t see examples of individual multimedia stories that communicate different types of information or a comparison of why one multimedia story is better than another. Perhaps this will be the direction for ONA in the future. Read more…