Look who’s back

It is a new semester. I have decided to rejoin the social media sphere (at least on a professional level) again. I am teaching online media this semester. If you would like to view my syllabus, please do. I break the semester into three parts: social media, visual communication and site creation. Feedback is always welcomed.

Also, Dave Stanton shared his syllabus with me. It is definitely worth a visit.

Visual Toolkit of Freebies – Step by step instructions

I spent the day working on my visual toolkit. I am in awe of how much easier it is today to share and embed beautiful elements on your Web site. I believe that anyone can use and follow this handout. Have fun!

*Thanks to @chrishogg for the tip on Scribd

To what extent should we embrace multimedia?

More news organizations are buying digital video cameras for their reporters asking them to gather video for their stories. I am supportive of this practice, however it is important to understand how people process visual information.

Research conducted by Mendelson and Thorson featured in the Journal of Communication argues that there are two types of learners: visualizers and verbalizers. Visualizers process information more quickly by viewing images, while verbalizers prefer to learn by reading text. In the experiment, participants read two stories: one with a photo and the same story without a photo. Their results showed that the presence of a photo hindered high verbalizer’s recall of the story, while moderate to low verbalizers were aided by the presence of the photo.

This study is interesting because newspapers are a predominantly textual medium, and thus a potentially significant portion of newspaper readers may be high verbalizers. Could newspapers be losing their loyal readers if they provide a photo or video adjacent to every text story? It would be interesting to find out whether the “typical” newspaper reader is a vebalizer and if the move online may affect the liklihood that they continue reading the publication online. Or could online news organizations package information differently, meeting the needs of both verbalizers and visualizers? Perhaps, a site could provide two separate links to a story presented in two different ways: one textual and one visual.

Writing captions for slideshows

Understanding how to write slideshow stories is still evolving, however people new to slideshow writing usually make a few common mistakes. When a person new to slideshow storytelling gathers information for slideshow story, they usually concentrate on taking photographs and recording interviews. However, they forget to gather details that can connect their audience to the story on a deeper level.

Details can also be added in captions/cutlines. People with newspaper backgrounds usually understand the art of writing a cutline. A cutline is an explanation adjacent to a photograph. A cutline can tell you information such as who is in the photograph or why the photograph was taken. Most photographers likely understand that they must do more than take a photograph, they must gather information that explains that photograph to readers.

Writing for slideshows requires the balancing of textual, visual, and aural information without being redundant. This means you do not want to repeat what is already revealed in the photograph or narration. So let’s say you recorded an interview and captured great moments on a camera, however a common mistake occurs when you forget to gather information about the pictures that you took. When you snap a picture, look at what is in the picture and ask the subject details about an object in the picture. So if they are holding a vase, ask the person when they got that vase, why do they like that vase, or why do they have that vase in their kitchen. These may seem like minute details, but those descriptive elements make the story come to life by providing a clearer picture of the subject you interviewed.

For more information on how to create slideshows, visit my teaching page.

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