Interactive Narratives -- the online documentary

By Melanie Gibson

Being a convergence journalism major at Mizzou, I’ve learned a fair amount about the importance of multimedia storytelling. To be honest, it’s gotten to the point that I can’t think that a story is complete with out a visual component, text and some form of audio component to really tell a story. Because that’s what we want to do – as journalists, we want to tell stories that are as rich in content and context as the individuals that we interview. And sometimes, the stories we find are far too big and rich to be contained in 1:30 radio news piece, a photo and text. This is where the documentary-style of reporting comes in. The documentary gives the reporters and producers a more time and space to be creative and tell the story, but the documentary is out and the online interactive narrative is in. This form of storytelling brings the documentary online to a wider audience and lets them interact with the story material.

Online news encyclopedia, brought to you by Encyclo

By Melanie Gibson

Harvard University’s new Encyclo offers a look into the organizations impacting the future of online journalism.

Produced by the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard, Encyclo is an online encyclopedia of journalism websites. The website says, “The Nieman Journalism Lab is a collaborative attempt to figure out how quality journalism can survive and thrive in the Internet age.” The Nieman Journalism Lab works with the Harvard Business School, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations, all of which are located at Harvard.

Each post on the Encyclo site contains “an encyclopedia-style write-up summarizing what’s important about the subject from a future-of-news perspective,” according to the site; a list of links, articles and commentary about the subject; a listing of the subject’s peers, allies and competitors; the five articles from the Neiman Journalism Lab related to the subject; and there are links to the five most recent articles on Mediagazer’s website. For those of you who don’t know already know, Mediagazer is news aggregator website focused on journalism and media.