December 02, 2010
Multimedia news features: Are they really worth the effort?
As journalists expand their digital skill sets, often they become enamored with making multimedia features: self-contained interactive modules built in Flash, audio slideshows, lengthier videos, etc. This content is often lovely, poignant, and well-produced. It’s useful for rich narrative storytelling. BUT: multimedia features also generally require considerable time and effort to create—and undivided attention to watch. For resource-constrained news organizations, it’s worth asking these hard questions: Do multimedia features (no matter how pretty they are) really meet the needs of online and mobile audiences? And how well do they support the business of news?...
By Amy Gahran
In last night’s Web Journalists Chat on Twitter, Staci Baird (who has worked on multimedia projects for organizations such as MSN Money, and who currently teaches the first mobile reporting class at San Francisco State University) raised this issue.
In response to the open #WJchat question: “Do we run the risk of the bells and whistles of technology driving/overshadowing the story?” Baird replied:
“You mean like creating multimedia stories that no one views? Audio/photo slideshows—don’t get me started!”
I share the exasperation Baird expressed. I understand that most people who become professional journalists do so because they love the craft of storytelling. That’s why it’s so appealing for journalists who seek to “go digital” to dive headlong into richer ways to tell narrative stories with sound and pictures.
The catch is that audio slideshows, Flash features, and lengthy videos demand the viewer’s complete attention—and that’s generally not a reasonable expectation in an online or mobile context. You can’t really get much value from rich audiovisual content if you let it “play in the background” while you scan your e-mail or check Facebook. If you pause and resume this content, the experience suffers.
Multimedia features that are encapsulated within media player tools like Flash or Silverlight present extra barriers to online and mobile audiences. Generally they have their own internal navigation which requires some effort for audiences to learn and use. In a digital context, the last thing you want is for visitors to have to think at all about how to access or move through your content.
Plus, on many cell phones and tablets, those technologies might not display at all. For example, the much-hyped iPad and iPhone still do not offer native Flash support. While native mobile apps offer more support for multimedia features, that content is only easily available to mobile users who already have—and use—your app.
Partial attention and the multitasking mindset are the hallmarks of most online and mobile users. With the exception of games and online courses, it’s rare that you’ll see an online or mobile user offer more than a few seconds of undivided attention (eyes and ears) at a time. This is why photo galleries featuring short captions, or short videos where audio tells most of the story, tend to succeed with online and mobile audiences moreso than audio slideshows.
Almost nobody—from journalists, to educators, to parents—likes this situation much. But it’s what we’ve got to work with. And when content creators resist adapting to this core user constraint, the result is that labor-intensive and costly multimedia features often end up drawing disappointingly low traffic.
I asked Baird to elaborate on her frustration with multimedia features. She said, “I see over and over the tendency to do multimedia and audio slideshows mainly because we can. And it’s tough in a journalism class when you’re teaching students to put a package like that together, because the fact is not every story needs to be done that way. If you’re going to teach multimedia storytelling, you need to also teach the importance of looking at traffic statistics. Because if audiences aren’t looking at it, why do we do it?”
The solution is not to abandon multimedia, but rather to adopt the web design principle of graceful degradation (or its inverse, progressive enhancement) to creating multimedia.
That is: Separate out the components of a multimedia experience so that multitasking users can have a rewarding experience, despite pausing or partial attention or limited device capabilities. This is first and foremost an editorial/storytelling consideration, and second a design/technical matter.
This more segmented approach to multimedia features also provides traffic opportunities: If each visual component has a unique permalink, that makes it easier and more compelling for visitors to share this content via e-mail, texting, and social media—a proven way to drive traffic.
“I’d like to see us talking more about decoupling multimedia packages and letting independent media components have a life of their own,” said Baird. “Then you can have a longer piece that people can sit and watch on their iPad, but simpler experiences for other settings and devices.”
Baird also observed that as tablets become more popular, they may end up becoming the new home for attention-demanding audio slideshows and other immersive multimedia or interactive features.
Fortunately, the emerging HTML5 web standard will offer far more sophisticated media options from within web browsers, including mobile browsers, without relying on Flash or similar support technologies. To see an example of what HTML5 can do with multimedia, including integrating Google Street View imagery, check out the interactive music video The Wilderness Downtown using Google’s Chrome web browser.
But if you’re really dedicated to making audio slideshows, then make sure you know what you’re getting out of it. Talk to your site manager to make sure you can track traffic not just to the pages where self-contained multimedia features are published, but information such as how long people viewed these features, and how they explored them. Learn what really works (or doesn’t) for your online and mobile audiences. Watching your traffic stats can help you get the most out of any kind of content, including rich multimedia.
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