Multimedia: A Must-Have in Storytelling

In some ways, journalism is practically stuck in the days of typewriters and clunky film-only cameras. Take, for instance, professional journalists’ views regarding the importance of multimedia skills.

Just 46 percent of journalism professionals who responded to a 2014 survey by The Poynter Institute rated the ability to shoot and edit video as “very important” in their field. By comparison, 76 percent of journalism educators said they think those skills are “very important.”

In fact, the Poynter survey pointed out that compared with journalism educators and journalism managers, journalism professionals are laggards in other areas of multimedia, too. Journalism professionals also attached less importance to other multimedia abilities: recording and editing audio, shooting and editing photos, and telling stories with design and visuals.

News flash, journalism professionals: Multimedia skills are as critical to modern storytelling as a notepad and pen were 20 years ago. And it’s not just “professional” journalists who must embrace multimedia. It’s also brand journalists and bloggers and anyone else in the business of telling stories. On the web, a blob of black-and-white text accompanied by a single photo won’t cut it in 21st century storytelling.

However, that doesn’t mean every story must be crammed with whiz-bang multimedia components; as in the case of the White House trying to jazz up President Obama’s 2013 State of the Union address with a flurry of graphics, the use multimedia can be overwhelming.

Ultimately, though, an information consumer is the final judge of how much is too much. The effectiveness of multimedia is in the eye of the reader, viewer or listener. For instance, I don’t have much patience for videos embedded in online articles, but I often flip through online slideshows. No one type of multimedia is necessarily more effective than the other, but to disregard the power of multimedia is a mistake.

In a recent article published by Mashable, Zachary Sniderman wrote:

A website without multimedia is like a cupcake without icing: Functional but lacking. These days, all manner of web pages from huge company sites to small business blogs are expected to add audio, photo, or video to their posts and homepages.

Here are three examples of how storytelling serves up the cupcake and the icing.

Whiteboard Friday

The folks at The Moz Blog, a must-read for anyone in the SEO business, have created something called Whiteboard Friday. Every Friday, the blog posts a video of an SEO specialist standing before a whiteboard and covering a buzz-worthy topic in SEO, such as content syndication or email alerts. A video transcript accompanies each lesson for those who don’t want to watch the video, along with a static image of a whiteboard showing a summary of the lesson.

The Chicken Whisperer

You may not have heard of Andy Schneider, better known as the Chicken Whisperer, but a legion of chicken owners has. Schneider has built a multimedia empire around the subject of raising chickens. Schneider wrote a book, produces a podcast, maintains a website, and even has hatched the quarterly Chicken Whisperer magazine, which comes in digital and print formats. Tractor Supply Co., a chain of agricultural stores that sponsors the Chicken Whisperer, posts YouTube videos of Schneider dispensing chicken-raising advice.

Snow Fall

Every time we discuss incorporating multimedia into our employer’s blogs, my boss reverently refers to The New York Times’ multimedia project “Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek.” The project, published in 2012, elegantly weaves a tapestry of multimedia threads — videos, photos, slideshows, interactive graphics, audio clips, a documentary film and even an e-book — to tell the tragic tale of an avalanche that killed three skiers. The New Yorker magazine hailed the project as “superb and thorough.” The Snow Fall project should be mandatory reading/viewing/listening for anyone engaged in multimedia storytelling.