In an effort to catch up after my much-needed vacation in Brazil and some other priorities that took precedence over blogging last month, I recently came across Forbes’ “interactive media map” showing media outlet’s popularity across the U.S. I was intrigued to learn that they scraped bit.ly data to determine whether or not a site was “influential” so I began digging around to learn more.
Carrie Ching, senior multimedia editor at California Watch, recently emailed me about their latest publication “Broken Shield,” which documents the unsolved death of an autistic patient at Fairview Developmental Center, a nursing home in Costa Mesa, CA. After watching the 11 minute video and perusing the wealth of supplemental content within the package, I am eager to hear your thoughts on it.
I recently came across Washington Post’s “The Media Divide: Inside America’s segregated news diet” by Evelio Contreras, Marc Fisher, Kat Downs and Jon Cohen. I love the irony of a news organization covering the nontraditional approach to news consumption in the 21st century and I think that this package does an excellent job at doing so.
II guest contributor Paul Franz writes a detailed review of Klynt, an interactive documentary builder that was released late last year by the French company, HonkyTonk Films. In a nut shell, Kylnt is a Flash-based interactive documentary that functions similarly to the “choose your own adventure†books that we adored in our childhoods.
It’s always fun to revisit multimedia projects at the end of the year when I create my ‘top 50′ list. As I do each year, I must stress that this is my list and not a definitive ‘best of’ list simply because I have not seen all multimedia created and thus cannot create a comprehensive list. Therefore, below are 50 projects that have inspired me most in 2011. A reader suggested last year that I better organize the sites, so I decided to pick 10 each from the five sectors: journalism, advertising, student work, philanthropy, and documentary. Thanks to everyone for the overwhelming inspiration and happy holidays!
The 36th annual Mountain Workshop wrapped up last week in Somerset, KY, with 24 multimedia participants, 35 still shooters and 1 picture editing student. The end result? 34 slide shows and 23 videos. This is definitely a good argument that you can find countless stories regardless of location!
I recently learned about a new (to me) interactive company, Neo-Pangea, located in Reading, PA. They teamed up with National Geographic to create a three-part series on the human brain called “Brain Games.” I reached out to project manager Phillip Krick to learn more about the interactive.
I have blogged about JSOnline’s impressive multimedia packages several times in the past. This time around I’m excited to take you behind the scenes of “Empty Cradles,” an in-depth series on infant mortality in and around Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Read my Q&A with fellow UNC grad Emily Yount, who helped produce many of the interactive pieces for this package.
SBS is churning out multimedia sites left and right. Last month it was “Goa hippy tribe” and this month it’s “Dragon Children,” a site focused on Chinese-Australian students within Australia’s education system. This topic became controversial after Amy Chua wrote the jaw-dropping article “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior” in the Wall Street Journal and was subsequently called ‘Tiger Mom.’ Regardless of what you believe, education (and lack thereof) is an important story to be told and lends itself well to multimedia.
Education Week, a non-profit education newsweekly, recently celebrated its 30th anniversary this September. As a multimedia producer for a company that focuses on very technical data and studies in education, it’s always challenging to visualize the information our reporters produce.
