The Multimedia Story: All Your Format Fixins’

Multimedia reporting is a tricky art to master. It requires storytelling through multiple media forms without being redundant — telling a story within a story that is unique and informs a bigger-picture story’s context.

Virtually all news organizations across the nation have moved to a multimedia format as media convergence has become the norm of the industry over the past two decades.

Among the biggest challenges in creating multimedia stories is choosing the right media forms to tell the story how it should be told. It is up to the reporter to determine what is the best media form, and different media forms are better suited for different objectives.

Where a video might be the best choice for an emotionally-grabbing or human interest element within a story, an audio story might be more pointed and informative on an issue, giving more depth to the greater story it is embedded in.

One example of a good multimedia story, produced by CNN, exemplifies good use of media form discernment and application through its use of photos and video to tell an emotionally-impactful story. It follows the story of a West Virginia mine explosion which took the lives of 22 miners in 2010.

We often see video used when natural disasters and tragedies occur because of the emotional weight of these news stories. We the viewers not only want to know what happened and how it happened. We also want to see who was affected, and how their lives continue amidst new struggles and heartbreak.

The reporter(s) who worked on this piece knew the importance of video in the case of the West Virginia mine explosion. Demonstrating timeliness, impact and human interest as its strongest news values, the piece not only informs the reader but it gives them more content to explore and educate themselves with. The copy itself gives an in-depth overview of what occurred and along the left panel of the article, we can click on videos that give us more personable accounts from those affected by the explosion.

Is any of the content redundant? This is an important question to ask oneself when evaluating a multimedia story. In the case of the CNN piece, everything has its place and everything tells a unique, yet complementary story which serves to both tell a standalone story and contextualize the bigger picture.