TAKEAWAY: In Australia, at The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, multimedia storytelling taking off—-and quite successfully—with Five Seasons, profiling five Aussie football players, their dreams and hopes.
Five Seasons here:
http://www.theage.com.au/interactive/2013/fiveseasons/
Multimedia storytelling is taking off globally, and that is a good thing. The more examples we have to study, the better the quality for this type of stories.
Our friends in Australia, at The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, send us a link to an example of multimedia storytelling they published recently.
Matt Martel, National Presentation Editor for Fairfax, tells me that they recently published Five Seasons, on “Aussie rules football.”
Matt is quite excited about Five Seasons , which profiles five players, their dreams, realities and role in football. The package includes narratives about each player, complete with photos and videos. He tells me that credit for the success of Five Seasons goes to Matthew Absalom-Wong, Joint Art Director,The Age, and his team.
So, I have established contact with Matthew and asked him three pertinent questions:
Mario:
How did the idea come about?
Matthew tells me that the story idea came directly from writer Emma Quayle:
“I’d thought for a long while that it would be interesting to follow a veteran footballer through a season – to get a sense of the physical and emotional toll it takes to get through a season, knowing it’s coming to an end, that you can’t do what you used to, that you had younger players trying to take your spot, and so on.
“The original idea was to do this as one big article for the paper come the end of the season. Then it occurred to me that it could be better to follow several players, of different ages, so that I could compare and contrast the things they went through, the different challenges they faced in a year, the different outlooks they had when they’re old/young/in the middle. Tom McKendrick (video producer) got involved early on as well, and we did one big video interview with each of the players, towards the latter part of the season. “
Mario:
How about deciding on the texture and pacing of the story?
Matthew:
On the online build:We wanted to keep it as a long read. We wanted the reader to engage with the story, immerse themselves in the player’s season. But at close to 30,000 words some form of structure was needed.The obvious path was to split the project by player, with each player’s story punctuated with video, galleries and quotes.
A functional version of the site was built first with the graphic design applied after. This was in part to do with our schedules, but it also ensured that design was determined by to the functionality, not the other way around.
Due to our video CMS we were limited in how we could embed the video. Had we more control, the videos and galleries would be more integrated into the page.
Mario:
How many and who were involved?
Matthew:
Emma and Tom were responsible for the content. Emma wrote the stories and took many of the photos (staff photographers supplied the bulk of the pics). Tom shot and edited the interviews. Stephen Kiprillis worked on the design, along with myself, and I took care of the HTML/CSS and JavaScript.
Mario:
What was the reader/user reaction?
Matthew:
The reaction has been great. We’ve had a pile of tweets about it, 99.9% positive, and lots of emails as well.
More multimedia storytelling to come
This success has obviously resonated with the folks at Fairfax.
“We want to do about 20 of these in the next year,” Matt told me. The smh.com.au website is now often getting more than onemillion unique users a day and is cemented as the number one news website in Australia, he said. “More than half of our work is digital.”
We are planning many more of these. The next one should be political in nature and will launch next weekend out of our Sydney team.
Matt is aware of the importance of developing these multimedia stories well:
One thing we are aware of is that we want a rigid approval process for any of these really time-intensive packages. They need to attract a significant audience and they need to build brand. They cannot be vanity publishing. We must also be significantly adding to the story.
Five Seasons is a fantastic start which should inspire everyone in the staff of the Fairfax newspapers to aim for this type of storytelling.
Vanity Fair: multimedia piece gets under New York City’s streets
Vanity Fair: What Lies Beneath
See story here:
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/2013/10/new-york-city-underground-subway-danger
A story titled What Lies Beneath takes us beneath the city, through the eyes of three men whose jobs are to make sure everything works down there.
Highlight:
Deep below the streets of New York City lie its vital organs—a water system, subways, railroads, tunnels, sewers, drains, and power and cable lines—in a vast, three-dimensional tangle. Penetrating this centuries-old underworld of caverns, squatters, and unmarked doors, William Langewiesche follows three men who constantly navigate its dangers: the subway-operations chief who dealt with the devastation of Hurricane Sandy, the engineer in charge of three underground mega-projects, and the guy who, well, just loves exploring the dark, jerry-rigged heart of a great metropolis.
Of very related interest:
The snowfallization of news: Stories still matter
http://www.thefunctionalart.com/2013/11/the-snowfallization-of-news-why-content.html
First paragraph:
Criticizing Snow Fall, the 2012 overwhelming multimedia project by The New York Times, has become a sport among journalists and news designers. At the same time, its enormous success has transformed its title into a verb: Snowfalling. Bulky, clunky, and superfluous are adjectives that I’ve heard being applied to it.
Gold Award for MyMatrixx
It’s news for MyMatrixx, a Tampa-based company which provides pharmacy and ancillary benefit management solutions for workers’ compensation.
Their newly revamped website, http://www.mymatrixx.com, has received the eHealthcare Leadership Gold Award for overall best website.
Mario Garcia Jr. and Garcia Interactive were the consultants involved in the project.
Here is how Mario Jr. described his experience:
myMatrixx is a very successful technology company that helps their customers manage workers’ comp benefits. They sell their solutions promising “simple, fast,effective, results.” The task in working with them as their design director was to make sure those same values apply to every engagement with the brand.
Pages we like
Here is a page from the Bild am Sonntag from Sunday about a story of the German National Soccer Team’s game shirt, and the headline reads:
Is this shirt ready for the title?
Our previous blog posts on multimedia storytelling
Norway’s Aftenposten and a multimedia story with happy ending
https://garciamedia.com/blog/articles/pnorways_aftenposten_and_a_multimedia_story_with_happy_ending_p/
Storytelling in the digital age: some essentials endure
https://garciamedia.com/blog/articles/pstorytelling_in_the_digital_age_some_essentials_endure_p
The (happy) evolution of those multimedia story packages
https://garciamedia.com/blog/articles/pthe_happy_evolution_of_those_multimedia_story_packages_p
The Guardian: elevating multimedia storytelling
https://www.garciamedia.com/blog/articles/pthe_guardian_elevating_multimedia_storytelling_p
Other multimedia storytelling examples worth studying:
Tomato Can Blues: a wonderful story, spectacularly illustrated, with special effects that mesmerized;
http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2013/tomato-can-blues/
The Russia Left Behind: photo sets the scene
http://www.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2013/10/13/russia/
Firestorm in The Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/may/26/firestorm-bushfire-dunalley-holmes-family
The Jockey in The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2013/the-jockey/?_r=0#/?chapt=introduction
Chasseurs du temps (Time keepers), L’Equipe (France)
http://www.lequipe.fr/explore/chasseurs-de-temps/#CHAP04
A Google Spreadsheet of Snowfall-type stories:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AnWYxsUNHS4FdGVYMnpkdGdTNTU0RS1SXzktcnZwRWc#gid=0
Longform magazine features
http://www.spd.org/2013/10/longform-magazine-features.php
VG of Norway: Prior to Norwegian elections
http://www.vg.no/spesial/2013/valg/tegneserie/
Gulf News: Syria refugees
http://gulfnews.com/multimedia/graphics/full-frame/syrians-affected-by-civil-war-share-their-stories-1.1237127
Gulf News: Historic Dubai Creek:
http://gulfnews.com/multimedia/graphics/full-frame/dubai-creek-bids-for-unesco-world-heritage-site-status-1.1244158