Documentary multimedia

Special Olympics uses twitter, multimedia to document Winter Games

Miami professor Rich Beckman has done it again. He is leading a massive project with more than 50 students to document the Special Olympics’ World Winter Game in Boise, Idaho. Deemed “the largest international sporting and humanitarian event of the year, with more than 2,000 athletes from almost 100 countries,” Beckman and his journalists will be working around the clock to deliver multimedia content for a week full of competitions and events.

Over a year ago I wrote about Beckman’s first Special Olympics site, which documented the 2007 World Games in China. I had the opportunity to produce both a video documentary and 3D graphic for the site, but unfortunately did not travel with the team to Shanghai (A job was calling!).

This year, Beckman leads a powerful team of student journalists from UNC and Miami. Coaches include New York Times’ Nancy Donaldson, Open Society Institutes’ Pam Chen, and multimedia guru Mike Schmidt.

The team is utilizing twitter, which already has more than 10 students chiming in about their current status. They already have 15 videos posted from Saturday night’s Opening Ceremony. And the mayhem is just getting started …

Make sure to check in with this site throughout the week as 50 plus budding journalists blog, twitter, photograph and videotape the events for the world to see.

Good luck all and I look forward to seeing your hard work!

Other posts that might interest you:

• University of Miami students promo projects on VisualJournalism blog
• New York Times sets bar high with multimedia coverage of the Olympics
• UNC documents lives of Thai tsunami survivors in "Andaman Rising"

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