A tour of your favorite professional and citizen journalism Web sites quickly reveals the countless ways to produce and arrange content. Video, for example, is now the medium that many are rushing to learn and utilize. What's next?

The goals of this research include testing new techniques for structuring individual multimedia stories, pages or entire Web sites that communicate news - especially complex news - more effectively. Effective communication extends beyond the efficient aggregation of multiple stories from multiple sources. Effective communication means the audience will perceive the content as more interesting and understandable, not just more accessible.

At the micro level of a single news story, this research synthesizes basic concepts from the fields of communication, educational psychology, and learning from multimedia. These concepts are combined to provide the advanced communication that the technologically savvy audience of the future will expect. At the macro level of a Web site (or content management system if you prefer), current trends suggest that it will be increasingly important to go beyond fixed "templates" for content to more effective and flexible ways to assemble multiple media. In other words, one size does not fit all content. Most journalists already know that different types of stories require different styles. The same applies to multimedia journalism.

If you believe this may be too complex for today's technology, you may be correct. If you think it may be too complex for the future, however, you may risk being abandoned by a restless audience of digital natives. The combination of the "PICK" concepts are illustrated on the right. While the combination is new, the concepts are not.

The challenge is for professional and citizen journalists to learn how to intuitively add these conceptual skills to the tenets of good, accurate, ethical reporting. That process will take time. The audience, on the other hand, will instantly appreciate an effective multimedia story when it sees it.

1. What is PERSONALIZATION?

2. Why INVOLVEMENT is important.

3. Writing coherently now expands to combining multimedia coherently.
This is called CONTIGUITY.

4. Maximizing engagement also
means minimizing "KICK OUTS."

A basic example of a PICK design
(Original pages courtesy: ABCnews.com)