Multimedia is not a separate section! a rant
I hate newspapers that put multimedia into a separate tab on their web sites. That means ALL OF YOU!
Why? What person thinks “hmm, I want to know what happened with Barack Obama today, I’m going to look in the Multimedia section”
WHY? It’s news! Put it in the news section. We’ve trained people to think of four content separations for 100 years: news, sports, entertainment, opinion.
Stick with it, why rebuild the learning curve? So many web sites try to rebuild the learning curve for people, forcing them to follow in this “innovative” (read complicated) forms of navigation and cockeyed thinking.
STOP IT!
It also just tells multimedia producers that they are the step children in this large family of pure blooded journalists. Change the culture. You’re not that special because you can write. In fact, you’re less special (heresy alert). It’s a visual culture, our language is built on visual verbs and adjectives. How many editors have said “show me, don’t tell me.”
On our new The Nevada Sagebrush web site (to be released in three months), there will be NO multimedia section. The multimedia content will be in the appropriate section based on the type of content it is or the section that produces it. OR the multimedia content will be packaged with their related stories.
Why can’t the rest of you figure this out?
###End journalism rant###
This is an important point (rant). But maybe stopping isn’t so easy. Why has it developed as a practice in the first place? Some possibilities:
• Because multimedia breaks the normal template of most content management systems, and so pages have to be built by hand or designed by programmers and inserted in a special section.
• Because the archiving function in most CMSs buries stories within hours or days and major pieces would get lost and never found again. Papers want to highlight the projects that took extra time to produce.
• Because only a few people produce multimedia and so they’re not part of the regular workflow. They get their own section because they sit in different places in the newsroom (?)
• Because managers want to segregate content that requires high speed connections and major download time for dial up users (?)
I’m sure there are other reasons too. The point is that “STOP IT” might not be possible overnight. It requires re-thinking news sites from the point of view of the user and not the producer.
The CMS problem makes sense. I forgot that not everyone uses Vimeo and Soundslides like we do. It’s easy for us to embed these files anywhere into the web site we want.
Major pieces I agree, should be different because they usually require redesigning web pages to make them work. This shouldn’t be in multimedia is should be in special. Special sections make sense, so make special sections online as well.
I agree, “it requires re-thinking news sites from the POV of the user and not the producer.”
Please?