What is it and why should journalists care?

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Permalink Reply by Tracy DeLatte on February 11, 2008 at 4:29pm

What were some of his lessons that could apply? How would you apply them?

I don't think you are crazy.

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Permalink Reply by Jonah on December 1, 2008 at 9:47am

Well, as a Heroes fan, it feels like it's own universe. There's the TV show. Then there's webisodes. Then there's comic books that are on the web, too.

While we can't do webisodes, necessarily, we can work across media. Here's some things I've thought about/tried:

• Take a lot of photos. I mean a bunch. One or two of them are going to go into the story, but the others could be used to create a slideshow or put on Flickr with captions.

• Take video while you're working on the story. Throw a caption in or edit on iMovie or some other software and put it on the web. It's easy.

• Use sound. If you're recording video, there are ways of getting just the audio track to use (if you don't want to haul around a recorder). Or, invest in something a little more high quality that records to mp3s and you can edit them with Audacity (free) or other software if you have it.

• Write a story for the web. No need to explain why web reading is different than reading in print.

So right there you have a print story (with photos), a photo album of the story, a video, an audio file (could be a podcast), and a blog/web story. That's a lot of ways to get a story, and the latter few can be as raw or refined as you want them.

Maybe I'm off on this, or maybe others have better ideas. I'd love to hear them, as I'm only a few months deep into this.

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Permalink Reply by Tracy DeLatte on December 1, 2008 at 7:02pm

Photos, video, sound and text... those are all things I already use every day to tell stories on my news Web site. In my mind that's not really transmedia. That's online journalism. The online audience expects most or all of those elements in a Web story.

A TV series branching out to a comic book is transmedia. In my mind, transmedia for an online journalist would be sending my news out as an e-mail, my travel series out as a layer on a Google Earth map or my traffic reports out to an iPhone app.

I'd still love to know other ideas too.

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Permalink Reply by Jonah on December 2, 2008 at 9:17am

I like it. I personally wouldn't want to get emails, but the Google Earth and iPhone ideas are great. I'd definitely use them. But all of it is on the web (just like the comic book series for Heroes). The question is, how do you best tell a story. What makes Heroes great is that the different stories compliment each other but are pretty distinct. That's why your iPhone idea is great: An update on the radio won't change directions I'm getting on my iPhone in real time. But an app (if you can get Apple to accept it) would.

I'm interested to see how this works differently for different types of stories (breaking news, travel, features, profiles, etc). I don't want to be updated on the newest feature on my iPhone, and I don't want audio or video of the county passing its budget.

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Permalink Reply by Tracy DeLatte on December 7, 2008 at 11:17am

We have a "rubber neck" audience of people sitting behind computers at work who like to get e-mails about breaking news. Our breaking news alerts often include links to live streaming video of the blazing fire, horrific accident, high-speed chase, police standoff or weather warnings (for tornado days). We also open a chat room alongside the streaming video and field questions with the information we've gotten from the reporters in the chopper or in the field.

There's no reason the iPhone traffic app wouldn't work. But I'm not quite good enough to program it. One day I'll get a Mac and learn or just convince someone higher up at the network that it's a good project to spend money on. I've also thought about using the same geocoding concept for crime stories or crime reports. You could give people the ability to see real-time crime trends in their neighborhood. I've seen it done by a non-news affiliated community group. I've suggested the idea as a special project for my station but it was put on hold. Everyone seemed to like it but the station's lawyer. Who knows?

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