GOOD MULTIMEDIA STORYTELLING
Touching Hearts
-- Joe Weiss, the only multimedia reporter at the Durham, N.C., Herald-Sun,
put together an amazing story about Duke University heart surgeons operating
on children in Nicaragua:
http://www.heraldsun.com/heart
Toxic Fire
-- Philadelphia Inquirer's multimedia version (the sick and the dead)
of their investigative report on a toxic fire tells a story much better
than words alone. http://inquirer.philly.com/specials/2000/fire/main.html
Pariah Nation
-- MSNBC's multimedia story about Afghanistan, by backpack journalist
Preston Mendenhall.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/afghan_front.asp
360 Degrees
-- An amazing site by Picture-Projects about the U.S. Criminal Justice
System. http://www.360degrees.org
The New Yugoslavia
-- WashingtonPost.com's Travis Fox has done several multimedia stories.
This is one.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/photo/onassignment/yugoslavia/index.htm
U Street in Focus
-- Take the Washington Post's tour through a neighborhood with text, maps,
photos, and sound, and you're likely to have a bit of deja vu if you visit
in person.
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/photo/blackhistory/front.htm
Race in America
-- This multimedia story on Magnolia Plantation, the New York Times' multimedia
addition to the series on race, was put together by two people.
http://nytimes.com/library/national/race/magnolia/indexnav.htm#
Tobacco: New times
for the Old Belt
-- This
might be called multimedia applied to a documentary, except that its root
was a three-day series that appeared in the Greensboro News & Record in
October 1999. Also check out the "Becoming Human" site, which Neonsky
helped produce.
http://www.neonsky.com/neonsky.html
Mummies
-- Discovery Channel Online commissioned Second Story to put together
a site that could accompany all of the channel's documentaries on mummies.
A team production, the site uses Flash to meld graphics, text and visuals.
Video is imbedded in "still" images and "drives" the text, but you have
control over where you want to go on the page or in the timeline, and
you can stop and start the "video" to read or re-read text, or study some
part of the visual.
http://www.discovery.com/highspeed/tlc/mummies/
Orangutans
-- Backpack journalist Smita Madan Paul took the videos in this story,
grabbed stills from the video and wrote the text. She also teaches multimedia
reporting at Columbia University.
http://www.discovery.com/stories/nature/orangs/orangs.html
Russian Space Camp
-- Backpack journalist Jane Stevens took the video, grabbed stills and
wrote the text for this story.
http://www.discovery.com/news/features/spacecamp/spacecamp.html
National Geographic
-- Check out the features in the adventure/explore section. There's some
multimedia storytelling going on here.
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/explore/
SITES OTHER THAN NEWS ORGANIZATIONS
The Beatles Web
site
-- An amazing site that continues to grow. It's part museum, part documentary,
with very creative ways of exploring an era. Its interface design allows
text, panning images, and animation to complement each other.
http://www.beatles.com/paperbackwriter/
Shoes
-- This
could be a feature story in newspaper.
http://www.centuryinshoes.com/
Klimt
-- A biography that's nearly a multimedia version of a book.
http://www.iklimt.com/index2.html
Fire trucks!
-- Davis, California's explanatory story of their fire department.
http://www.city.davis.ca.us/fire/tour/
Pregnancy
-- A personal science story through pregnancy, this blends non-linearity,
graphics, and personal storytelling into a very compelling bundle.
http://www.parentsplace.com/first9months/main.html
Burma
-- A photographer and Web designer gets a little bit of help from his
writer friends, and puts together a fabulous piece of multimedia storytelling
about Burma.
http://www.hillerphoto.com/burma/#
PBS documentary
Web sites
-- Explore the sites associated with PBS programs. Although most promote
programs, provide additional resources and education modules, some fascinating
storytelling focuses on how the filmmakers produced their projects.
http://www.pbs.org
ALSO CHECK OUT:
http://www.enature.com
http://www.witness.org
http://www.greenpeace.org
SCIENTIFIC INSTITUTIONS
Harbor Branch Oceanographic
Institute
-- This lab does storytelling about its own expeditions.
http://www.at-sea.org (if it doesn't
appear, try going through http://www.hboi.edu).
And some researchers are doing their own storytelling. One is Edie
Widder, whose bioluminescence site explains the wonders of glow-in-the-dark
sea creatures Ð http://biolum.org (if
it doesn't appear, try going through http://www.hboi.edu)
NASA
--Many sections of NASA do storytelling.
http://www.nasa.gov
One example is: http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/station/
(The text is still a bit too characteristic of traditional press releases,
rather than storytelling.)
Vanderbilt University
--
David Salisbury edits this online research journal, which uses video,
stills, audio, and graphics regularly in its stories.
http://exploration.vanderbilt.edu
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
-- The most
interesting things are found under the category "For Young Scientists"
(lower right). Check out Wild-Eyed Alaska and BioInteractive.org.
http://www.hhmi.org
Woods Hole Oceanographic
Institute
-- WHOI does its own storytelling about its expeditions in Dive and Discover.
http://www.whoi.edu/home
You can also find other expeditions by clicking on "WHOI at Sea", and
then "Online Expeditions," one of which is WHOI's expedition with National
Geographic: http://www.nationalgeographic.com/sealab/antarctica
Cold Spring Harbor
-- This lab did a very ambitious and wonderful explanatory storytelling
project on DNA. http://vector.cshl.org/dnaftb/1/concept/
