By Joanna Sullivan
Athens, Ga.-
Journalists have long used strategic maneuvers to engage
their readers. Until recent years, a journalist primarily uses words to convey
emotion, engage the senses, and create a sense of pacing that united the power
of fiction with real life story telling.
However, modern journalists are putting this slew of tools
and techniques in another format. Digital sagas like the New York Times’ five
chapter “Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Funnel Creek” show that a story’s power
can be enhanced and contextualized with interactive visuals. The question is
how will journalists use this transition to better inform and connect with
their audiences?
Dr. Barry Hollander, professor of journalism at Grady
College, believes that the answer is in using these expanded options wisely.
“We know now how little patience people have for consuming a
multi-media story,” Hollander said. “The Avalanche is probably a rare
exception. The New York Times poured so many resources into it and it’s a remarkable
story, but really the magic number for most multi-media stories is three to
four minutes.”
Living in a world that appreciates brevity, Hollander
explained that it is imperative for the journalist to think in dense,
bite-sized, yet entertaining multimedia news pieces.
“The challenge is to get across as much information as you
can in a short time period without driving readers crazy with an information
dump,” Hollander said.
To clean up the dump, contemporary media professionals look
to data visualization as a speedier, more digetible alternative to traditional
storytelling.
Otherwise wordy, number-centric articles suddenly become
pop-up books of information with the right graphic. Media professionals like Grady
College's Dr. Welch Suggs use data graphics to smooth out the kinks and avoid information
overload.
“Data visuals tell a really powerful story that you just
can’t tell in words,” Suggs said. “It’s told in seconds while written stories
are told in minutes.”
Suggs explained that such visuals give the audience a clearer
sense of a larger story at play.
“It’s just so much easier to tell a story when you
understand the numbers and to be able to explain the relationship between one
variable and another” Suggs said.
Data graphics do not necessarily tell a qualitative story the
same way that words can, instead they act as a supplement to traditional
stories.
“No matter how much I dress up the data it isn’t really
storytelling,” Hollander said. “It is a component to telling a story, but the
key is there are now lots of ways to tell stories and a lot of facets to
telling those stories.”
How effective this new integration of multi-media technology
and data visuals in a world of storytelling dominated by text will be remains
unclear.
“A certain
scrambling occurs when a media ecology is first being developed,” said Dr.
Richard Menke, Media Theory professor within UGA's Franklin. “We can see that
the novel, the radio, and the television tried to establish themselves as their
own medium and eventually they settle into particular tropes that solidify the
medium.”
Despite the comfort offered in telling stories through new
media, there are always skeptics.
“Most of my English students are in the department because
they are bound to their relationship with the book,” Menke said, “But the
purpose of my classes on media are to step outside of that and see that stories
have a way of traveling throughout history from one medium to another, and that
is not necessarily bad.”
Similarly, this transition from long-form storytelling to entertaining
information bites is a downgrade rather than just a change, according to some
journalists.
Dr. Leara Rhodes, a journalism professor in Grady College, proposes
that information should not have to be sugar-coated to be consumable.
“Why does every piece have to be a form of entertainment? ”
Rhodes said.
Even if it is difficult or long or dense, Rhodes believes there
should still be a drive for consuming information.
Others, such as Hollander, have no qualms with the
transition of forms and believe that entertainment plays a significant role in information
consumption.
“I understand where Dr. Rhodes is coming from,” Hollander
said. “We are a country that loves to amuse ourselves to death, but John Stewart and Stephen Colbert have proven that the idea that you can’t have news
and entertainment at the same time is foolish. It is a terrific purist approach
that will lead you to having no audience.”
He believes that entertainment can attract the more hesitant
audience to get excited about the news and the world around them.
“We have to remember that there is an audience that doesn’t
want to spend a lot of time reading,” Hollander said. “Multi-media storytelling
is in some way the gateway drug."
-edited by Chris DeSantis
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