#multimediareporting

New Media Journalism: Final Project

By Rex Annor

May 2, 2021

Multimedia Reporting is one of the most interesting courses I have taken. It was interesting to note that most of its characteristics reminded me of Multimedia Development combined with News Production. It also expanded on combining different forms of media to report news stories. I learned through some of the mistakes reporters make during interviews and examined how what they said may be professional or unprofessional. I was assigned to combine image, video, sound, graphics, and text to address a story.

I was given a week to research, write, publish, and share my post on social media. The pressure to get assignments done on time motivated me to accomplish work on time. It was not always a smooth road but one thing I can appreciate is that it taught me through my mistakes. I believe I have learned a lot through some of my mistakes. One thing I appreciated was getting honest opinions from classmates and instructors, which was constructive because it helped me see where I needed to improve. Moreover, I learned that planning and preparing are crucial to every interview.

This course provided several different media methods to produce a story. I thought this course was very beneficial to my success in this industry.

During the first week, I really enjoyed being able to cover a previous story that I had published. For viewers who follow your site, this can be nice for them to see updates on stories that may have interested them. I remember watching talk shows when I was younger, and I always appreciated seeing how guests were doing after the show.

 Taking a look at interviews and finding a good execution style was extremely helpful. The week three discussion board assignment had students selecting a story, and examining how the journalist had done. I reviewed a story that was completely terrible. There were several things that the journalist should have done differently. So I thought this assignment was appropriate, because it really highlights what we should and should not do as journalist.

I think it was also beneficial to examine websites and how they are setup. Although these sites have a huge amount of viewings and have been around forever, it showed me what’s good to incorporate on my site. I was then able to observe my own website and see how user friendly it is which was of great value. From five websites, this provided me with an accurate amount of knowledge in creating the best possible website.

Learning how to get paid is of significant value when having a website. It’s almost like an extra incentive for investing so much time into the work that you like to do.

Multimedia Reporting gave me a chance to incorporate many of the lessons I’ve learned thus far in New Media Journalism. Each week we were given an assignment to complete utilizing at least three multimedia elements.

Originally, I expected this class to delve more into the different aspects of what multimedia products are, but instead I feel this was more of a hands-on application of how multimedia assignments relate to each other and the end result as a more thorough and intriguing story. 

I learned about poor interviewing techniques and the bad results that come from it. I learned the importance of not holding onto bias when you interview someone and to listen to your interviewee. Because this course required a higher level of journalistic ability, it tested my skills and made me search for material to meet he guidelines. It helped me learn to approach someone and set up an interview and how to interview to create a good product.

Personally, I feel I became more confident and I also think I was faster at knowing what to put together and how they would all fit together. I felt more competent in my skills overall and this helped me react to each assignment with more determination and I noticed my subjects reacted better as a result, they were more laid back and treated me like a professional.

This class for me represented the opportunity to use my own judgement to select what multimedia tools would better suit my stories. I appreciated the fact that I could use the ones that I was more comfortable with, instead of having to use a multimedia outlet that I felt, did not suit the story.

Even though I have gotten better at shooting and editing video thanks to the knowledge I have gained in this course, it still isn’t my favorite form of telling my stories. Don’t get me wrong;video is of course, a very powerful form of storytelling, but it’s not one that I manage with ease or the one that I feel works the best for me. I do however, enjoy incorporating compelling and interesting photography into my different stories, accompanied many times by detailed inforgraphics which I have learned to relish as a very clear way of letting the readers see clear and hard data regarding a particular topic.

I also discovered my enjoyment of making audio clips in the form of podcasts that many times included sound bites from my interview subjects, as well as audio slides with pictures that told the story, along with the subject and/or my own personal narration. I was thrilled that I got to make the decisions to incorporate these elements into the stories I wrote in each of the assignments. Tutorials that were provided to us by our instructor through these four weeks, such as “Standards for Multimedia Storytellers” were incredibly resourceful.