Multimedia competitions

Roanoke.com’s Hellgate interactive placed 2nd in BOP 2008

I am happy to announce that the Hellgate interactive that I led and produced here at The Roanoke Times garnered 2nd place for best multimedia package in the 2008 BOP awards! The judge’s comments were quite harsh, but I agree that overall a lot of multimedia packages could be more complete and it will help me strive to work harder on my interactives in the future.

Oakland Tribune took first place with their in-depth multimedia package on homicide, “Not just a Number.” Even though I am impressed with the depth of coverage, I have to question a journalistic package produced mostly by an outside company. Is it fair to have pieces produced with help of outside sources compete with in-house staff working amidst other deadlines and projects?

Please let me preface what I’m about to say with the fact that I do agree that this package deserves the limelight because it brought together a lot of the newest technologies (RSS feeds, databases, mapping …) and the presentation was innovative and creative. No matter who produces the content, it still told an amazing story and benefits the online community.

After some digging around, I found an article about the production of the Tribune’s site by outside multimedia company, 49th parallel productions. I find their “key milestones” most interesting in that more than six months passed from initial story planning to publication with a production team of 16 people … what a rarity!!!

That being said, I feel proud to have placed second while producing my package within a two month time span with other daily and weekly commitments. I was able to produce a 1/3 of the content (race coverage) within 24 hours of the race with no edits or updates posted afterwards.

Congrats to all of the winners and I look forward to spending more time delving into the other sites to get inspiration for future projects! Click here to see a complete listing of all of the winners.

Other posts that might interest you:

• The importance of multimedia competitions within our industry
• Multiple competition deadlines looming … enter now!
• A case study of a 2008 SNDies multimedia winner: MediaStorm

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