Margaret’s 3rd year journalism blog

Multimedia storytelling

Multimedia stories use a variety of media to portray a message, pushing the boundaries of traditional print, radio and video journalist roles. New age journalists require the ability to write, interview, frame an image, film action shots, edit and put the story together.

Many online news sites take advantage of multimedia stories to provide the consumer with an abundance of information. For example, with stories on www.bbc.co.uk, you’ll often find:

• A written story
• A video of the news story
• A video (or sometimes audio) of an interview with a key player in the story
• A timeline
• The story ‘In Pictures’ (often pictures provided by citizens)
• Links to past/related articles
• Links to profiles of the countries involved
• Links to related websites (could be government or organisation)
• A poll

For example, most of these mediums are used in the London Bombings coverage on the site:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/uk/2005/london_explosions/default.stm

This allows the site visitor to get a much more comprehensive insight into the story than what is available in the newspaper or in a 30 second TV news story.

When a reporter sets out to create a story for the web, they need to utilise their video camera not only to capture interviews, events and surroundings but still images and audio- so their material can be used for all types of stories. Preparing for such a story involves extensive research so that one can have a storyboard prepared and a good idea of how their multimedia story can be constructed before they start shooting.