Multimedia Literacy is Not Optional

By John C Abell

Created Feb 20 2008 - 1:08pm

John C Abell, February 20, 2008

• You work in a print environment, you tell the story in words -- prose poetry if you can.
• You’re in TV? Two words answer every call to arms: camera crew.

Too often, the best format is completely ignored.

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Thinking outside the box is harder than it sounds – pretty much by definition.

But how you choose to tell a story  -- the method you select -- tells a story of its own: about your fears and your strengths and your comfort level using unfamiliar tools. With so many ways to tell a story it’s a small wonder that newsrooms may be overwhelmed with the choices, and eager to take refuge in the familiar.

Call it the “We’ll add a slideshow later” syndrome. You know what I’m talking about.

• You work in a print environment, you tell the story in words -- prose poetry if you can.
• You’re in TV? Two words answer every call to arms: camera crew.

Trouble is, defaulting to what you know best just won’t do in the multimedia space we all seem to occupy now, where convergence is not optional and there is only one race to one Promised Land: the digital domain and specifically – for now, anyway – the web.

Mindy McAdams counsels that if you have a slavish devotion to what you do you won’t tell every story well. She is urging newsrooms to, well, throw away the box.

On her “Teaching Journalism Online [1]” blog McAdams lists of the strengths of seven media types that any newsroom has (or should have) at its disposal (video, text, photo, audio, audio slideshow, data, graphic). The lists were generated by a Regina McCombs, a senior producer for multimedia at StarTribune.com, in a Poynter [2] session with journalism educators called “Planning a Multimedia Story.”

She asked the journalism educators in the room to shout out the strengths of each media type, which she wrote on a flip pad one by one. (It’s an exercise you could do in any newsroom meeting, or in a classroom.)

Too often, journalists today still operate on auto-pilot. At a newspaper, the default is text. At a TV news operation, the default is to race to the scene with a camera. All the energy pours into a first rendering of the story in a format that might not be the best format for that story!

Too often, the best format is completely ignored.

McAdams says a “big shift” in core thinking is required, and the time is now. “Without multimedia literacy, the people in your newsroom can’t do a good job for the digital distribution channels that have already outpaced and outstripped your traditional media platform.”

Full blog post here [3].