LISTEN: Elegba - The God of Chaos & the Crossroads. The First in my radio series on orisa traditions in black America. (click this photo, then blue LISTEN button).
‘New’ House in England to be Made Entirely from Waste Materials
Musician Mohsen Namjoo has been called the “Bob Dylan” of Iran. He’s currently in exile in East Oakland, after his music caught the ire of Tehran.
More on PRI’s The World.
Photos: After a Hmong healing ceremony for a pregnant woman, a feast.
Nice.
From the ‘Posted’ files: Tree vs. Car: This was over on McGee Avenue last November, when a liquidambar gave up the ghost and trashed a parked Cadillac in its death throes. The best part was the note left by some neighbors who witnessed the incident and left a note for the Caddy owner under the windshield wipers.
Multimedia in Journalism: An Interview with theTimes’ Amy Harmon
Amy Harmon recently published a piece where she followed a young man with autism for a year. The Times then helped add other multimedia elements to this story. You can find the link here. The following is an interview with Harmon about the process.
MZ: How did the idea of integrating all that multimedia into a narrative piece come to be? Was this the first time the Times tried anything like it?
AH: The Times uses multimedia to tell stories all the time, we even won an Emmy for one cool approach to this recently. But what I think is so innovative about the “quick links” that my colleagueJosh Williams invented for the autism story is precisely the integration that you are asking about. In an immersion-narrative like this one, the whole point for me, as the writer, is to get readers hooked enough to keep reading to the end. I struggled for weeks, over many drafts, to do that with this one. I hoped they would want to know: will Justin manage to secure a place for himself in the world beyond high school? Will he find a job that uses his artistic talent? Will he remain friendless? The last thing I wanted was to add multimedia distractions, no matter how whizzy. So to me, the beauty of the quick links is that they don’t take you away from the story. They don’t open a new tab from which you may never return, they don’t introduce a dimension of plot or character that is tangential to my compulsively-labored-over text. But they DO bring the story to life in a visceral way that my words do not, and perhaps never could, even if I had longer to perfect them, or was a more gifted writer.
As to how the idea came about: it grew out of the editing process, pretty late in the game. This was not a case where we sat down ahead of time and tried to conceive of a new way to convey information. But one thing we had done, which is pretty standard now, is produce a short video that would accompany the story on our Web site. And it was when Glenn Kramon, the paper’s enterprise editor, saw the video that he asked whether it would be possible for readers to see and hear Justin as they read the article online. The video itself was great, we all loved how the producers had told Justin’s story. But it was also obvious that seeing and hearing Justin, even in just the raw footage, Glenn was able to grasp the nature of his autism with a clarity that he had never had in reading my written descriptions. And he didn’t want readers to have to watch the stand-alone, seven-minute video to have that experience. He wanted it sprinkled into the story. It seemed obvious once he said it, but since none of us had ever seen anything like that, I was sort of doubtful that it could be done, at least in time for my story to run.
At our next meeting, though, Andrew DeVigal, who heads the multimedia team, came with Josh Williams, a member of his staff. Josh instantly grasped what we wanted, and it was only a couple of days later that he showed us the first iteration of the links. Josh had been involved in developing much fancier stuff, and he didn’t think this was such a big deal. But I did. Maybe because it is still essentially a familiar format, rather than a completely new one, I felt like I could work within it, and it gave me this totally new way to make the story better.
(via reportingonhealth)
