Multimedia journalism

Daily Republic launches memorial package for slain councilman

Multimedia journalist Chris Jordan recently emailed me about their latest multimedia package at the Daily Republic commemorating the one year anniversary of a slain city councilman. “Remembering Matt Garcia” gives an intimate look at the passionate 20-year-old, and the legacy he left behind.

Chris mentioned that they only had four days of production time on this package, and for such a small turn-around time I applaud them for their efforts. I wanted to highlight this package to prove that noteworthy multimedia can be done in a matter of days, rather than weeks.

I enjoyed watching both of the videos, “Legacy” and “Life.” The interview shots were great, the photography was solid, and the music and nat sound worked well for the story. My only minor quibble is to make the lower thirds titles consistent, with the same font color and background. Also, while the narrator in “Life” was obviously passionate about the piece, I wondered if there was a more suitable audio personality to tell the story.

The news blog was great because it answered all of my questions about who killed Matt, and what happened to them. The pictures and links to multimedia added visual interest to the blog, and each post was extremely well written. I would be curious to know if the posts were also news stories in the paper and if they reverse-published the articles …

I really like the idea of including a “Remembrances” section, and posting people’s reactions to this story. However, white type on black is always extremely hard to read, and even more so in this case since everything is in caps. Although it might ruin the feel and design by reversing the type to black on white, it would certainly help the eyes!

Last, great job implementing a Vuvox timeline to give quick nuggets of information on the case. Chris did mention that he couldn’t figure out how to embed the vuvox presentation in the existing flash project. I have not built nor embedded Vuvox before, so hopefully someone out there with experience in the area can give him some advice.

If they had more time, I would encourage them to work more on the design of the site, and attempt different options for the navigation. However, I am glad they spent their limited time on the content since the stories are arguably most important.

Thanks to Chris for emailing me and letting us discuss this project. As for the rest of you, I love getting emails about recent projects, so please don’t be shy!

Other posts that might interest you:

• Vuvox: An innovative storytelling tool or an over-rated component?
• Guantanamo Bay interactive presents data effectively
• Organizing multimedia navigations by media type versus story type

© 1 September 2009 Innovative Interactivity (II).