You’ve done a TV story, rewritten it for the web and promoted it on social media. All good. But you can still do more with the story online by adding multimedia elements and there are good reasons for doing so.
“Multimedia often means a better reported story and better ‘digestion’ by the audience,” says Catherine Rentz, an investigative reporter at the Baltimore Sun who has also worked for the award-winning PBS program Frontline. For example, her story about a Maryland man whose neighbors were shocked to learn he was a leader in the KKK includes video, still photos and documents.
How to decide what elements to include? Rentz suggests you ask someone outside the newsroom why they might go online for a particular story. When she was working on Flying Cheap for PBS, a friend wanted to know how many flights at the local airport were outsourced to a feeder airline. That led Rentz to build a map with the data Frontline had collected.
Other advice from Rentz:
- Repurpose your interviews. “You only use a small fraction of what you get,” Rentz says, “so put multimedia in other pieces…I don’t like leaving reporting on the ground when we have a good story.”
- Shoot everything. When Rentz looked into the death of Freddie Gray, she went to each location the police had taken him to after his arrest and shot video and interviews. Video clips were embedded into a timeline and a map to try to unravel “the 45-minute mystery of Freddie Gray’s death.”
Megan Christie, a producer at ABC News, says digital stories can dig deeper and “connect the dots,” which you can’t do during breaking news. She helped produce a five-part series on the Boston marathon bombing for the third anniversary of the attack. “Even though you know how it ends, it’s suspenseful,” she said.
“Use work you have already done to create special digital content,” Christie advises. The Boston marathon series added new elements, like 9-1-1 calls that were released later, and interviews with people who wouldn’t talk at the time.
Christie has these additional tips for multimedia storytellers:
- Push the boundaries of traditional journalism. What has your news organization never done before? Bosses are more open now to “crazy ideas” to draw new audiences.
- Strategize at the beginning of the reporting phase. Think about elements to collect. Think about the packaging before it’s too late. And organize it!
- Make sure elements can stand alone. Christie points out that once a story is in circulation you can’t control how the audience will ingest your story. If you offer bonus video or PDF documents, always push back to the main content, she says, but offer context with each element so a viewer understands the point without having to see the main story.
- Ask, “What audience am I trying to reach?” The ABC story Madaya Mom about life in Syria was designed as a comic book for mobile to reach a wide audience, and especially children.
It takes a multimedia staff to do the kind of work Christie and Rentz showed at the 2018 Excellence in Journalism conference but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done by a solo journalist. “Special digital pieces don’t have to be long,” Christie says. Her advice is to start small. “Clip a piece of an interview and add some footage, 30-45 seconds long, that doesn’t require a lot of editing.” Then ramp up to adding several elements to a day-of story, like raw video, a document, a still photo and maybe a 9-1-1 call.
Bottom line: “Design should always be in the back of your mind,” Christie says, “to offer the user a more interactive, comprehensive experience.”
