(photo: Kyle James)

An online multimedia story is a combination of video, text, photos, audio, graphics and interactive elements where each aspect complements the others. It allows a reporter to draw on the strength of each medium to tell a more compelling story.

But making a multimedia story really shine requires forethought and planning. Even before going out to report, journalists need to think about how they’re going to approach the story, when they’re going to use video, text, sound or photos, and then tie everything together to create a cohesive package. onMedia’s Kyle James has tips on doing the prep work to make sure your multimedia story is a success.

Playing to their strengths

Really good multimedia storytelling is more than just posting a video or a graph alongside a text story on a website. It’s about taking advantage of the characteristics of each medium to present the different aspects of your story in the most engaging way.

I find it’s best to sit down at the very beginning and divide the contents of the story among the different media. I ask myself: “Would this aspect work best as a short video, or should I take pictures or maybe write a couple of paragraphs?”

When I’m breaking things down, here’s what I keep in mind:

Video: Best for action and movement, shows what is happening (a protest, a fire, a person cooking, a dance performance). Can capture emotion well and good for strong quotes (eyewitness to a significant event, person recalling a tragedy). Video really draws people in.

Pictures: Good for capturing a specific, important moment, especially if it’s emotional (a reunion of long-lost siblings, soldier returning from war). Photos are good for showing places, environments and things that don’t move (buildings, landscapes). People can study pictures, unlike with video. That old cliché “a picture is worth a thousand words” still rings true in many instances.

Audio: Conveys emotions, feelings. The voices of experts can give your story credibility. Background (ambient) sound, especially if combined with pictures, can give a good sense of place. Audio works best when combined with pictures or video.

Graphics: These work well providing complex information in easy-to-understand ways. Stories with lots of numbers and statistics can benefit from graphs, showing trends or relationships (clothing exports over the last decade, wage growth). Diagrams can show how things work or how something came about (where floodwaters reached, how the bridge collapsed). Maps show where the story unfolded and can be layered with interactive elements.

Text: The written word works well for abstract, complicated aspects of a story. It’s the place to provide background and analysis, as well as headlines and photo captions. Many multimedia producers save text for the information that can’t be conveyed with video, audio, pictures or graphics.

If we’ve got video of an event, why would we simply describe it with text? Video’s power is showing action, so we should use it. Pictures of people overtaken by powerful emotions or recordings of their voices talking about their experiences are going to be very compelling. Yet an opinion piece on a policy or development or an analysis what has been learned in the wake of an accident might best be suited for text.

Writing it down

Since I can’t keep all this in my head, I need to write things down.

Click here for a planning list that helps you organize your thoughts around a story and how you want to cover it. It asks for things like a working title, a short story synopsis, conflict/tension involved, the main characters, who you’ll interview, and what works best with video/audio/pictures/etc.

Those who are more visually minded might want to write up a chart instead. The picture below is a quick sketch of possible elements of a multimedia story that I’ll call “The Bridge.” While this isn’t a real multimedia project, the story is true. In 2010, a stampede on a bridge in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh during a big festival killed 350 people and injured 750 others.

In this instance, I’ve made headers of the main media elements and put in aspects of the story that could fall under each. The arrows between some of them point out aspects of the story could have several elements. For example, the hourly timeline would be an interactive graphic that would incorporate text and pictures.

Assembling a storyboard

Now that you’ve got the elements figured out, you will want to create a rough storyboard of your project. A storyboard is a sketch of how the story will be organized and laid out on the screen. It’s a good idea to do a sketch of the opening page of your multimedia story, the first thing users will see, and then subpages or sections as well.

I’ve quickly drawn up mock-ups for the landing page and one inside page.

On the landing page, the first screen people will see on coming to my story, I’ve sketched out (very roughly) the title and the kind of picture I think I’d like.

I’ve put a space for some text to give us the very basics of what happened (remember, text is good for background and context), and then a possible navigation menu with four categories.

I could add a video or more pictures. But right now, I don’t think I want much more on my opening page, so I’m going to keep it simple.

This second page is where users land if they click on the first link in the navigation column, and we go to the background page. I’m using text because it’s good for context, video because we might find some footage of the actual stampede, a map to show users where things happened, a timeline to take us though the day of the tragedy, and eyewitness accounts from people who were there that combine pictures and audio

A storyboard is not only a good organizing tool, it can help point out things you might have missed. It can also help show you if you’ve actually got the resources and time to do all the things you want to do.

Storyboards aren’t written in stone, they’re just guides. You might well start changing things around, or adding and dropping elements, after you begin doing your reporting and seeing what great material you get or what’s not going to come through after all.

Things to keep in mind

• Multimedia stories are multi-dimensional, they use different media elements that complement each other
• They require planning and forethought
• Start thinking in a non-linear way. Instead of “first part” and “second part,” think “this part” and “that part”
• After preliminary research, start thinking about the different media to use – draw on the strengths of each
• Come up with a rough storyboard – you can always change it as you go along

For more onMedia posts on multimedia, see

Visual storytelling and moving beyond ‘multimedia’

A look at what the New York Times is doing with multimedia

The test of the multimedia storytelling app, Stellar

Written by Kyle James, edited by Kate Hairsine

Photo: flickr/gywst

Infographics can enhance a visual story’s appeal and are extremely helpful in presenting complex information in an easy-to-understand way. Now, it’s easier than ever to use graphics in your videos thanks to more advanced and user-friendly software. OnMedia’s Kyle James takes a look at how a production team from Indonesia used graphics effectively in their award winning video feature.

Journalist and editor Andi Muhyiddin had an important story to tell, one that suited itself well to his medium, television. He wanted to tell the story of Indonesia’s Citarum River, once a gently flowing waterway west of Jakarta, now considered by environmental groups as one of the most polluted places in the world.

Citarum is now a chemical dumping ground for area textile mills and a rubbish bin for many of the five million people who live in the river basin, although some of them depend on the river for their water supply.

Muhyiddin knew he could get powerful visuals as small boats glide through what seems to be a landscape of trash. But he also needed to present statistics on the severe pollution—how much waste goes into the river, what kind it is, what effects is it having on the waterway itself and the region’s environment. As those familiar with TV know, the medium isn’t naturally suited to presentations of a complicated numbers. It often needs a little help, and that’s where the infographics came in.

You can watch Muhyiddin’s video below, which was a finalist entry at the 2013 German Media Development Awards.

Clarity and variety

Muhyiddin had specific goals in mind as he was thinking out how to structure his 10-minute package and use graphics.

Andi Muhyiddin

“All stories on television should be easy for the audience to understand, which is why we need graphics,” he said in an e-mail interview from Jakarta, where he is an executive producer at Berita Satu TV. “[Graphics] help the audience understand the message when the existing video is not enough. Also, they make the package more attractive and add variety.”

And given the short attention spans of today’s audiences, good graphics are a good way to keep your audience from reaching for the remote.

If you watch the Citarum video (and I would highly recommend doing so; it’s well worth the ten-minute time investment), you’ll see that Muhyiddin starts off with overhead black-and-white shots of the river and surroundings, accompanied by fairly dramatic music. He then presents a few statistics in simple, clear text: it’s the most contaminated river in the world, 400 tons per day of cattle waste goes into it and 25,000 tons of domestic waste. The text appears almost as if it’s being typed out, as if on an old Teletype machine. But there’s nothing old fashioned here.

Sometimes all the words in a short sentence fade but one, which then moves to a different position on the screen and is incorporated into a new sentence and new statistic. At one point, a title changes from white to almost blood red. The presentation is dynamic, keeping the audience interested while getting across the newsworthiness and seriousness of the issue.

“Like video, graphics should tell the message effectively,” he said, and dynamic ones are more attractive to the viewer than static words on the screen.

Towards the end of the feature, Muhyiddin used pictorial graphics (starting at 8’42”) to depict deforestation, soil erosion and sediment build-up, ground-water depletion and the waste from cattle, factories and households that regularly enters the river.

Moreover, in areas where literacy rates are lower, these kinds of non-textual visuals that present data clearly ensure your audience is really getting the story.

According to Muhyiddin, it’s best if a producer works with someone with strong experience in graphic design or art, such as Dimas Noegroho, the “best graphics artist in my office,” he added.

For Noegroho, putting together a good package involves good pre-production, including getting the designers on board in the early stages. How information should be presented graphically should be figured out during the scripting and storyboarding process, he said. It’s shouldn’t just be an afterthought.

The tools

Noegroho himself uses Adobe products such as Illustrator, Photoshop and After Effects in his work. For 3D modeling, he uses Cinema 4D Studio, 3ds Max and Viz Artist.

These software packages aren’t free, and they’re pretty complicated, requiring a good deal of training, he said. But for simpler graphics, especially static images, there are many websites that offer data visualization and infographics tools for free. Noegroho recommends visual.ly, which has partnered with big names like Showtime and Al Jazeera.

Other free options include Blender, free and open-source software for 3D animations. Gimp is a free program similar to Photoshop and Inkscape is the free counterpart to Illustrator. Check out this list of some of the best free graphic design software out there today.

For a video project similar in scope to the Citarum project, Noegroho said if everything were planned out in advance, he would need about three weeks to a month to get the graphics in place.

“Basically, we’re delivering data, but not just giving numbers,” said Noegroho. “The infographics explain the whole chronology of the problem step-by-step and how it came about.” That way, he added, people get the data in easy-to-digest bites which build up to present the bigger picture at the end.

Research done at Indiana University in the US found that animated graphics offer a way to keep viewers watching and to help them remember stories better. But the study cautioned about text graphics used alone. It found that while text can help viewers remember information in difficult stories, it often doesn’t hold viewers’ attention.

So Muhyiddin’s own solution, adding movement to the text, appears to have been a good solution.

Author: Kyle James

Professor Gilardi, why have you initiated the data-driven journalism course?

Political science imparts knowledge that isn’t that far removed from data-driven journalism. Our master’s students have to learn how to analyze and interpret data anyway and many of these methods are also applicable to data-driven reporting. On the other hand, data journalism makes use of other techniques such as web-scraping, data mining or data visualization which haven’t been adopted by the social sciences. As such, we believe that data-driven journalism can provide added value to our course.

Can journalists who work with data-sets also benefit from the social sciences?

Absolutely! [At the institute] we have specialist knowledge of political theories, which is something that is needed in political data-driven reporting. However, sociological approaches are not always included in such reporting. As social scientists, one of our strengths is in imparting analytical techniques, such as recognizing complex relationships. However, in journalism, information is often only presented descriptively. Frequently, unfortunately, social science findings are not adequately taken into consideration.

How can the situation be improved?

We scientists are also partly at fault because we often don’t present our research results in an attractive manner. This is how scientists can benefit from data-driven journalism. It helps us make our research more comprehensible, make it easier to digest. Being able to major in political data-driven journalism is a way of bringing science and journalism together. We all have something to gain.

Is this the first master’s major offered in data-journalism?

There are journalism courses that include data-journalism. But to my knowledge, internationally, we are the first political science course to offer data-driven journalism as a major.

Fabrizio Gilardi is professor of public policy at the Institute of Political Science at the University of Zurich.

Interview: Steffen Leidel (kh)

Editing desks around the world have been experimenting with the tool, including the Guardian data blog, Le Monde, a Dortmund regional newspaper – and of course, the Deutsche Welle. Datawrapper is open-source, and can be freely downloaded – it’s available in English, German and French.

In an interview with DW Akademie, Lorenz clarified what he thinks the “right” portrayal of data is all about, and explained the advantages of Datawrapper for journalists.

How did you come up with the idea to develop Datawrapper?

Datawrapper is a tool for getting started with data journalism. It offers journalists a very simple way to create the right diagrams during their hectic workdays. We looked at a lot of different tools beforehand. Many Eyes by IBM, for example, had a very interesting idea, but unfortunately the project wasn’t further developed.

With other offerings, like visual.ly, I cast a critical eye. Data are presented with many different effects, but this can actually decrease the graphical impact. We wanted to set ourselves apart from such projects. So at the beginning of November, we introduced a new version of Datawrapper that offers a limited – but very professional – selection of diagrams.

You’ve mentioned the “right” kind of diagrams. What does that mean, exactly?

Unfortunately, you can always find plenty of bad examples when it comes to displaying data in journalism. It’s often the case that the article is first written, and then a graphic is sought to accompany it. In that case, diagrams aren’t much more than ornamentation, which doesn’t fulfill their potential. The message is easily misunderstood, and – often enough – incorrect.

Used correctly, illustrations clarify an issue – but they can also misrepresent it. Let’s take the simple example of a line graph. If the time axis is stretched, it could show a small increase, in a market for example, as a boom. Or, with a bar graph, leaving off the zero line makes for very different conclusions than by including it.

Simply put, there are rules for good visualizations, which journalists should know and observe. The best book addressing the topic is The Wall Street Journal Guide to Information Graphics by Donna M. Wong. One typical mistake is to split a pie chart into too many pieces – there should never be more than five. But it’s easy to find examples with more than 20. That’s why visualizing specialists always make jokes about pie charts. Datawrapper is designed to prevent such problems, while supporting the user.

You can observe these rules while using other data visualization tools, so what makes Datawrapper special?

That could be the case, but with a lot of effort, I’d say. Journalists shouldn’t be spending hours correcting colors and lines. Datawrapper is made especially for newsrooms – it was supported by a journalism training organization affiliated with the German Association of Newspaper Publishers. That’s why it’s free. The online version can be used within a news site’s own layout, or installed separately on a server. In principle, an entire data editing desk could be built around the tool, which is something we want to support.

We want to strengthen other media branding, not our own. For example, we think the Datawrapper logo should come off the results if the tool is used intensively. We wanted to give journalists who work with numbers the opportunity to explain things a little better to the rest of the world.

Media outlets can’t do that with other tools like Google or visual.ly. With those tools, the data flows to a cloud that the media organizations don’t own. Especially in the case of investigative reporting, clearly one would have reservations about sharing data with a third party. Aside from all this, Datawrapper is easily customizable.

What kind of graphics can be generated?

Right now, there are four basic options: bar, column, line and pie charts. With the so-called donut chart, one can display the total in the middle of a pie chart. In order to generate the charts, all that needs to be done is create and upload a data table to Datawrapper. The embed code does the rest.

What’s the next step?

The coding side is being further developed, mostly by Gregor Aisch. He’s created a cartographic library, in hopes of making news desks a bit less dependent on Google Maps.

As a later step, we want to develop more complex charts, which are also more visually pleasing. For example, tree maps where one can portray state budgets.

UPDATE: The Africa News Innovation Challenge has just announced Datawrapper as one of the winners in the 2012 round of funding and technical support. Congratulations Mirko and Datawrapper!

“Twenty digital journalism projects have earned $1 million in funding and technical support as part of the African News Innovation Challenge (ANIC).

ANIC is the largest fund for digital journalism experimentation in Africa, and is designed to spur solutions to the business, distribution and workplace challenges that face the media industry.

A jury of 15 international media strategists, technology innovators, and funding experts evaluated more than 500 project plans before selecting winners from a shortlist of 40 projects.”

Interview: Steffen Leidel
Translation: Sonya Angelica Diehn